AIRLINES MAINTENANCE COST ANALYSIS USING SYSTEM DYNAMICS MODELING

摘要

Maintenance costs in airlines change as time passes. As airplane ages, it needs more often and more expensive checks. Due to these growing expenses, airlines are getting more interested in cost analysis. Under financial pressure, they avoid buying new airplanes and try to maintain the old ones, but sometimes try to cut the maintenance costs by ignoring or delaying some checks. In other words, they are more disposed to spend small amount of money frequently through time, than to spend a great deal on a new airplane with low maintenance costs. Therefore, in such situations, the following questions raise that what solution is more efficient as we look dynamically to the system?For answering this question, this paper will present a System Dynamics (SD) model of the influence of aging aircrafts and their growing costs in an airline. This goes further by presenting an overall maturity factor based on Boeing’s maturity curve [1] which is a function of aircraft age. The result will be variation in costs, revenue and margin through time.