Health monitoring impact on non-repairable component supply methods

Purpose - From on-board automotive diagnostics to real-time aircraft state of health, the implementation of health monitoring and management systems are an increasing trend. Further, reductions in operating budgets are forcing many companies and militaries to consider new operating and support environments. Combined with longer service lives for aircraft and other systems, maintenance and operations processes must be reconsidered. The majority of research efforts focus on health monitoring techniques and technologies, leaving others to determine the maintenance and logistics impact on the systems. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach - This research analyzes the impact of a health monitoring system on a squadron of aircraft. Flight, maintenance and logistics operations are stochastically modeled to determine the impact of program decisions on supply metrics. An arena discrete event simulation is utilized to conduct this research on 20 components on each of the 12 aircraft modeled. Costs and availability are recorded for comparison across three sparing scenarios to include economic order quantity (EOQ) for baseline and health monitoring cases and a just-in-time (JIT) health monitoring set of simulations. Findings - Data are presented for EOQ and JIT supply methods. A comparison of health monitoring enabled supply to current methods shows cost savings and availability gains. The different methodologies are compared and discussed as a trade-space for programmatic decisions. Originality/value - This work demonstrates the ability of health monitoring systems and condition based maintenance to affect supply ordering decisions. The development of trade-spaces within operating environments is demonstrated along with the ability to conduct cost benefit analyses.