Configuration-Aware Aircraft Maintenance Program Bridging: Data Model, Decision Rules and Scheduling Optimization Illustrated with FAA Airworthiness Directives

This design-science paper specifies the IMPB-TDO framework: a relational data model with explicit limit anchors and evidence links; seven ordered decision rules that assign each requirement–aircraft pair to one of seven disposition classes, including an engineering exception that is never defaulted to “not applicable”; flight-hour, flight-cycle and calendar forecasting with “whichever occurs first/later” logic; and a network-flow mixed-integer program that schedules only approved tasks. Four Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Airworthiness Directives (ADs) from 2024–2025 serve as illustrative cases, and the framework is demonstrated on a synthetic 14-aircraft fleet and on randomly generated capacity-constrained fleets. The ADs differ in what determines applicability (all serials, in-service embodiment, repair method, certificate date) and in costing unit; two published fleet cost totals are ceilings, not expected costs. In the worked example on AD 2025-16-06, production embodiment, a planned modification and an undocumented configuration each changed the disposition. On a fleet built to contain these situations, an SB-aware tracking comparator still differed on 3 of 14 configuration-sensitive pairs, all traceable to provenance or coupled actions; a model-level filter differed on 10. On 18 generated instances with fleet-wide inspector capacity, the optimization lowered the common objective by a mean of 15% (up to 22%) relative to the best of two planner heuristics wherever a heuristic found a plan, found compliant plans on 5 instances where both heuristics failed, and proved infeasibility on 1; no run was proven optimal within 180 s, so gaps are reported. The paper contributes a specified, reproducible artefact; the synthetic results demonstrate mechanisms rather than operational effect sizes, which require the validation protocol provided.