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Historic records show that the cost of operating and supporting an aircraft may exceed the initial purchase price as much as ten times. Maintenance, repair and overhaul activities represent around 10-15% of an airlines’ operational costs. Therefore, optimization of maintenance operations is extremely important for airlines in order to stay competitive. Prognostics, a process to predict remaining useful life of systems and/ or components suffering from aging or degradation, has been recognized as a revolutionary discipline that can improve efficiency of aircraft operations and optimize the aircraft maintenance. In this paper, the origin and development of prognostics is firstly introduced. Thereafter, the state of art of aircraft maintenance is reviewed. Next, the applicability of prognostics to optimize aircraft maintenance is explained, reviewed, and potential challenges and opportunities are explored. Finally, some recommendations for further research are discussed in perspective of deployment of prognostics to optimize aircraft maintenance.
Sprong et al. (Sun,) studied this question.