Development of engineering structures for scheduling and control of aircraft maintenance

This paper documents research and development that were undertaken as collaboration between the Industrial Research Institute of Swinburne University of Technology (IRIS), Armor Pty Ltd and QANTAS. The objective of the research was to investigate the application of a unitary software structure, composed of the critical path method (CPM) materials requirements planning (MRP) and production activity control (PAC) techniques, to the management of large-scale maintenance activities (specifically aircraft maintenance). This structure had previously been applied to the manufacturing (i.e. assembly) process but the maintenance problem posed significant new challenges. First, there was the issue of generating a disassembly structure, and second, the reconciliation of demands arising from non-serviceable components. This paper documents the implementation of the structure and the methods that were used to validate its functionality on a test-case application (i.e. aircraft maintenance problem).