Just In Time (JIT) Aircraft Maintenance System

ABSTRACT: Inefficient handoffs and limited fault evaluation prevent the Air Force from achieving high daily rates of touch-labor maintenance and rapid return-to-service. We propose to research the best concepts in the commercial and military arenas to enhance existing aircraft maintenance capabilities, and develop the concept demonstration for an Automated Aircraft Maintenance Prediction System (AAMP). The AAMP system will be designed to (a) discover the relationships and dependencies of subsystem faults; (b) leverage the knowledge of these relationships to enable the detection of new faults; and ultimately (c) determine the recommended maintenance actions without crew debrief. The concept AAMP system will demonstrate the capacity to do the following: Analyze the current and historical data of C-130 aircraft health and maintenance records to learn the inter-relationships and nominal state. Perform root-cause analysis on system faults to detect future faults that require flight line maintenance. Employ an open architecture design for the interface between aircraft subsystems and the ground based databases to manage maintenance records. Incorporate wireless technology to automatically transmit aircraft data to the depot, so priority and sequence of maintenance actions will be scheduled prior to aircraft arrival. Utilize other existing computing and software technologies. BENEFIT: Besides flight light maintenance for the Air Force and commercial airlines, this technology has direct applications to other highly urgent line maintenance settings including ground combat vehicles. The AAMP system could be used to help insure the reliability of systems used on military vehicles and improve the performance of in-theater vehicle maintenance.