Work Package 2 | Smart Availability
Smart Availability aims to improve the efficiency of aircraft fleet maintenance by developing digital tools that enable the fleet to be operated with high availability, reliability, and cost-efficiency.
What does this mean? Let’s look at our five topics;
Predictive maintenance
Operations
Tactics
Strategy
AR / VR Remote Support
For tactics, things become more complicated. Say you have one hangar (who doesn’t?) that fits multiple aircraft. Again, each aircraft has different maintenance needs but also has different flight plans. How to arrange the layout of the hangar such that one can do as much work as possible, with a minimum hassle of towing and re-arranging needed? This is one of two examples for which BrightSky helps optimise tactical planning and scheduling.
The last component of this work package is a remote support system that utilises techniques such as Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) to assist in maintenance tasks.
Each component of this work package delivers one or more proofs-of-concept, which pave the way for the use of modern techniques such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and optimisation in the airline and MRO industries. The ultimate goal is to maximise the earning potential of the fleet by improving its maintenance efficiency.
For day-to-day operations, the planners at KLM’s line maintenance have to assign tasks to teams of mechanics pretty much continuously. It’s not a trivial task, because aircraft come and go continuously, and each one needs different (kind of) attention. But, it is sometimes repetitive and manual. Can this be done differently? We think so. Meet LiMiTS, which stands for Line Maintenance Team Scheduling. A tool that helps in the operational phase of the planning process. This tool assigns aircraft to teams of mechanics, taken into account exactly what needs to be done on the aircraft, and by when. In BrightSky, we’ve made this tool run for our colleagues in the day-shift, and we are currently extending to the night shift.
Finally, moving to strategy. Each year, an airline has to make its network schedule for the coming year(s). Of course, the most important aspect of this is destinations. But, aircraft can’t fly without maintenance, so maintenance slots are an important aspect of creating the network too. So how to approach this? Should we plan for short, frequent hangar visits, or for less common but longer visits? And should those slots be in the hangar, or can we perform sufficient maintenance as line maintenance? What will the effect of manpower shortage be? Important questions, tough to answer. So meet our Maintenance Policy Simulator. A tool designed for answering exactly those questions by simulation. Already, the tool has been used multiple times for decision-making. It ‘replays’ historical years, but with different scenarios for maintenance capacity.
For predictive maintenance, we aim to bring the algorithm on board! Usually, predictive maintenance algorithms run on ground-based servers. It works, but you need to transfer a lot of data, and you may lose precious time in doing so. By uploading the models to the aircraft itself, actions can be taken much faster! We call this ‘predictive maintenance “on Edge”’. During BrightSky, we have done this for our KLM fleet, and we are now looking for ways to do this for our customer airlines as well!
