Aircraft Maintenance
Erudine and EADS Innovation Works have partnered to provide one of the world’s biggest aircraft makers with a powerful new maintenance planning system...
Today’s air travel market is fiercely competitive, with hundreds of operators worldwide that often compete for passengers on the same routes.
In such an environment, being forced to ground an aircraft for maintenance means crucial revenue lost to rivals. To avoid interruption to schedules, airlines need to repair and safety-check aircraft as they stop along their routes, using the precious few hours between flights for engineering works.
Rigorous and thorough planning is essential to keep aircraft in the air and ensure passengers reach their destinations on time.
Many aircraft manufacturers offer this maintenance planning as part of their comprehensive after-sales services, including spare part and engineering management systems.
Airbus
Erudine and EADS Innovation Works were approached by Airbus, one of the largest aircraft manufacturers in the world, to deliver an improved short-term maintenance planning system to meet its customers’ changing needs.
As part of ongoing research into beneficial new technologies, the aircraft maker looked to Erudine and its Behaviour Engine technology, and the experience of EADS Innovation Works in the aircraft maintenance domain, to initially produce a demonstration of a new planning system.
EADS is a large multinational group operating in several technology-driven sectors, including aerospace and defence. Its Innovation Works division is devoted to driving the group’s technical innovation capability in all areas of operation, scouting out and applying the latest technologies to deliver cutting-edge solutions.
Short-term maintenance planning is an extremely complex problem, with an enormous number of input variables.
An improved maintenance planning system can minimise costs, reduce the risks of delay or cancellation and provide a maintenance plan in line with each airline’s particular business needs.The task given to Erudine and Innovation Works was to deliver a prototype planning system that could rapidly filter through the huge number of options available to isolate the most effective maintenance schedules, but also be flexible enough to meet the various business models and flight paths of individual airlines.