Opportunistic Maintenance in Aircraft using Relevant Condition Parameter based Approach

Opportunistic maintenance has been an essential part of all systems-maintenance, implicitly if not explicitly. However, as systems become more expensive and complex, the decisions involving opportunistic maintenance activities become more complicated. In this paper, we discuss a few issues that arise while carrying out the opportunistic maintenance, and try to resolve them with the help of a popular optimization technique called Genetic Algorithms. We also present a few results concerning relevant condition parameter based maintenance, as it has a high potential to be an opportunistic maintenance in complex systems. A systematic methodology is designed to enable the maintenance crew in deciding which items to be maintained when an opportunity arose. The cost of premature replacement is compared with the cost of down time, in the optimization process using Genetic Algorithms.