Page 29 - AAA JULY - SEPTEMBER 2019 Online Magazine

[ MAINTENANCE REPAIR OVERHAUL ]

Planning storage are enabling more equipment to share

condition-based data with a centralized server,
making fault detection easier, more practical,
and more direct.
Studies estimate that big data analytics and
Ahead predictive maintenance, if implemented prop-
erly, may reduce 30 per cent - 40 per cent of
maintenance budgets. Some estimations sug-
gest potential 70 per cent reduction in aircraft
breakdowns and considering that an aircraft
on ground (AOG) can coat approximately
US$100k per hour, utilizing such technology
seems like a no brainer.
PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE IS HAILED AS THE While data holds enormous amounts of
MRO INDUSTRY’S NEXT BIG THING potentially useful information, a lot of it is gener-
ated by industrial sensors and dumped into vast
Jay Menon data lakes making it difficult to analyse. And it‘s
only going to get worse – by 2026 the amount
Faulty or overlooked maintenance has been the cause for some of of generated data by Flight Data Recorder and
the worst aircraft disasters, and maintenance is still factoring into Aircraft Health Monitoring will increase from 2
the top five reasons of domestic aircraft delays. This has prompted million terabytes per year to 98 million.
aerospace companies to take a hard look at implementing analytics
and artificial intelligence (AI) in order to predict potential mainte- Timing maintenance procedures to match
nance failures on aircraft before the failures happen. maintenance needs is improving rapidly, thanks
Instead of scheduling repairs based on unplanned failures or to Big Data analytics, while smarter equipment
manufacturer-imposed intervals, airlines have started to adopt a is able to provide operators with real-time con-
predictive maintenance approach. Failure prediction, fault diagnosis, dition information. With the cost advantage now
failure-type classification, and recommendation of relevant mainte- favouring the continued operation of older
nance actions are all a part of predictive maintenance methodology. fleets, the competitive edge now lies with new
maintenance techniques and technologies.
Next Big Thing As its name implies, predictive maintenance
The demand for prescriptive and predictive analysis based air- uses techniques to determine when in-service
craft maintenance is growing exponentially among the end users, equipment is most likely to need maintenance.
which is catalyzing the growth of aviation MRO software market. By triggering specific maintenance operations
Critical features that help predict faults or failures are often buried only when they are actually needed, predic-
in structured data, such as year of production, make, model, and tive maintenance helps optimise maintenance
warranty details, as well as unstructured data such as maintenance planning and allocation of capacity, which in
history and repair logs. However, emerging technologies such as the airline industry alone could reduce mainte-
the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, analytics, and cloud data nance labor costs by 5 per cent -10 per cent,

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