Through-Life Data Exploitation to Reduce Downtime and Costs

Aerospace, vehicle and technology sectors all depend heavily on through-life recording, reviewing and managing user, support and technical data: from design, through in-service support, to disposal. The ability to exploit this kind of data efficiently and effectively is vital to improving safety, reliability, maintainability, supportability and affordability. The volume, inconsistency and relevance of raw data needs to be addressed, as does the ability to make it contextual – but without applying human bias to make the data fit or support a preconceived assumption or forecast. The task is made even harder when complementary sources of data in an organisation are not connected or integrated, leading to “islands of data”. This paper draws on practical experience to propose a number of techniques that can be applied to through-life data exploitation to successfully reduce downtime and costs. These techniques include correlation of symptom/fault/fix data to enhance diagnostic strategies; integration of outputs from “islands of data”; and maintenance categorisation techniques to identify poor performing repair practice. The paper also specifies in what way, if correctly harnessed, these techniques can contribute directly to the improvement of availability and reliability of platforms and systems, and of their support and maintenance costs, before considering other industry sectors that might benefit from these strategies. © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the International Scientific Committee of the "2 International Through-life Engineering Services Conference" and the Programme Chair – Ashutosh Tiwari.