How Aircraft Operators Can Benefit from PHM Techniques

Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) techniques can provide a wide range of benefits to aircraft operators. Since the primary goal of PHM systems is to estimate the health state of components and equipments, as well as forecasting their Remaining Useful Life (RUL), they are often closely associated with the reduction in the number of unscheduled maintenance tasks. Indeed, the avoidance of unscheduled maintenance is a very important factor, but this technology may potentially lead to considerable further savings in other fields. Scheduled maintenance planning, improved troubleshooting, inventory management optimization and intelligent aircraft allocation to routes are other examples of how the operators can benefit from PHM techniques. These benefits may lead to important competitive advantages such as reduction in operational cost and increase in fleet reliability. The purpose of this work is to enumerate and explore qualitatively some of these benefits in terms of the mentioned competitive advantages to aircraft operators. Although PHM systems can offer benefits to other members of the aeronautical sector such as aircraft manufacturers and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM), this work will focus on the aircraft operator's point of view.