PhD Juseong Lee and his supervisor dr Mihaela Mitici of TU Delft have won the First Prize Thomas L. Fagan, Jr., Student Paper Award at RAMS 2021. Reliability & Maintainability Symposium (RAMS) is a premier conference in reliability, availability, and maintainability engineering, which is held annually in the United States. The prize winning paper entitled “Multi-objective analysis of condition-based aircraft maintenance strategies using discrete even simulation” was presented at the 67th RAMS of 2021. The award is accompanied by a plaque and a $1,000.00 honorarium.

Abstract:
As aircraft maintenance is transitioning towards data-driven condition-based maintenance (CBM), its cost and performance objectives need to be re-evaluated:
– how are these objectives related under various CBM strategies?
– which objectives are conflicting?
– what are the trade-offs between the conflicting objectives?
– what is the impact of this transition on aircraft maintenance.

We show non-trivial trade-offs between performance-oriented objectives (the number of degradation incidents and the delay due to maintenance) and cost-oriented objectives. The CBM strategy based on Remaining-Useful-Life prognostics dominates other strategies in the knee region of the Pareto fronts. This implies that the transition towards data-driven CBM strategies can reduce the cost while maintaining the performance of aircraft maintenance.

The paper is published in IEEE 2021 Annual RAMS proceeding https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9605761.