Systematic Improvement of Fleet Operations by Integrating Enterprise Health and Maintenance Data

The punch line of the paper is the use of the theory of constraints by Goldratt to iteratively improve the process of maintaining a fleet of aircraft. The idea is to treat support as a process rather than doing the typical analysis and focus on improving the individual elements of the process without considering the effects on the process as a whole. The approach described is iterative and adaptive to address the nature of a complex support system. The theory of constraints is widely used as an analysis method to improve manufacturing processes. The paper recasts fleet support as a process where throughput is fleet readiness; inventory is the aircraft, support equipment, spares and maintainers; and work in progress is the current faults/degradation that needs attention. Some results are given that were generated using a support process simulation tool based on a generic fleet of advanced air mobility aircraft.