Reliability Based Methodologies for Optimal Maintenance Policies in Military Aviation

摘要

In Military aviation, depots confront situations of declaring certain components as High Failure Rate Components (HFRC) to shortlist them for reliability improvement and subjecting them to reviewed maintenance actions. Presently this is done mainly through intuition, experience or based on the number of unscheduled failures at repair depots. This paper develops a methodology by selecting three variants of the same aero engine as a case for deciding a threshold based on reliability, at which the component can be rendered HFRC. Further an optimization methodology based on downtime is also evolved to review the overhaul policy for the HFRCs. Generalized Renewal Process (GRP) models have been utilized to compute Maximum Likelihood Estimators (MLEs). The authenticity of all the developed models is tested through numerical examples and is validated with the existing field conditions.