A supporting framework for maintenance capacity planning and scheduling: Development and application in the aircraft MRO industry

Duarte Dinis, Ana Barbosa-Póvoa and Ângelo Palos Teixeira

International Journal of Production Economics, 2019, vol. 218, issue C, 1-15

Abstract: This paper proposes a framework for the qualitative and quantitative characterization of maintenance work to support Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) organizations in performing capacity planning and scheduling. A quantitative assessment based on 372 maintenance projects collected at a Portuguese aircraft MRO confirms that a significant part of the maintenance work is stochastic in nature, given the amount of unscheduled maintenance. The proposed framework, entitled FRamework for Aircraft Maintenance Estimation (FRAME), is intended to allow MROs in managing this uncertainty throughout the maintenance planning process and comprises for that end a set of requirements for data treatment and a method for data analysis. The established requirements address important shortcomings found in the collected data that prevented the use of maintenance data for capacity planning and scheduling as is. The developed method for data analysis, entitled 3-Dimensional Maintenance Data Analysis (3D-MDA), is based on a space-time-skill coordinate system in which indicators are calculated from historical data to comprehensively characterize the expected maintenance work. Space refers to the aircraft work zone where maintenance is performed, time refers to the project work phase when maintenance is performed, and skill refers to the type of technicians required for maintenance to be performed. The established coordinates address the limitations of reviewed techniques by allowing accurate estimations of required resources for capacity planning and an extended range of constraints for maintenance scheduling. Being generic in nature, FRAME is applicable to maintenance in other industries, or even to other activities with due adaptations.

Keywords: Maintenance data; Data treatment and analysis; Capacity planning; Scheduling; Risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925527319301586
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:proeco:v:218:y:2019:i:c:p:1-15

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2019.04.029

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Production Economics is currently edited by Stefan Minner

More articles in International Journal of Production Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().