REVIEW OF MAINTAINABILITY AND MAINTENANCE OPTIMIZATION METHODS FOR AVIATION ENGINEERING SYSTEMS

Reliability is an essential element for aviation systems operators in order to accomplish assigned missions in a continuous challenging world. Increased reliability could be achieved through increased availability and maintainability. This has emphasized the importance of maintenance, especially for the systems designed to operate in less friendly environment. An efficient maintenance process in case of airborne assets could be achieved through optimized preventive maintenance methods, considering also the influences of palliative maintenance actions. This would reduce the logistic footprint, especially when operating in remote and challenging areas of operations. The present paper focuses on surveying the optimization methods of the maintenance policy in the case of the aviation engineering systems, on the grounds that an improper policy would increase above an accepted threshold the risks to mission accomplishment and to human operators.