Financial Reduction of Aircraft Maintenance Plan Under Safety and Maintenance Constraints

This paper presents a potentially scalable method able to reduce maintenance costs associated with Candidate Certification Maintenance Requirement (CCMR) plans without compromising safety. The failure condition is the floating free caused by the horizontal stabilizer trim actuator (HSTA), which is representative and based on a real case study. An Excel file was created to let the user input the fault tree which was reduced using the cutset theory. In Matlab was developed both the solution algorithm using Matlab heuristic, which takes the Excel file as input, and an interface for the user to input the cost of each maintenance task, latent failure rates, evident failure probabilities, lower and upper bounds, and whether it is flight control. Finally, a cost-benefit analysis was conducted to reduce system latency. The results demonstrated significant cost savings over the life cycle compared to pre-optimization expenses.