Cyber-physical spare parts intralogistics system in aviation MRO

Abstract

Spare parts management is a vital supporting function in aviation Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO). Spare parts intralogistics (SPI) is the operational perspective of spare parts management and significantly affects the performance of MRO activities. Some studies have proposed managerial methods and integrated systems to improve the efficiency of spare parts intralogistics. However, spare parts intralogistics still suffers several difficulties, such as lacking data for heterogeneous resources, incoordination between various operation steps and inefficient performance analysis. Inspired by the successful applications of Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) and Internet-of-things (IoT) in manufacturing and logistics, CPS and IoT can be applied in spare parts intralogistics to improve its efficiency. This research proposes a cyber-physical spare parts intralogistics system (CPSPIS) to improve the efficiency of spare parts intralogistics management. It introduces IoT technologies to turn on new capabilities for enhancing the traceability and visibility of the resources and front-end operations in spare parts intralogistics. A conceptual framework is proposed first to analyse the system components comprehensively. For process management, a system is donated to synchronise the resources and the operations during the execution, using the collected real-time data. Furthermore, the design for resource and operation management in CPSPIS is illustrated in detail from the technical aspects. An automatic performance analysis system is proposed to manage the KPI and performance monitoring in real time. Finally, the proposed design and systems are implemented in a real-life case company to evaluate the performance. Several contributions have been made to this research. First, the conceptual framework comprehensively analyses and models SPI by adopting IoT technologies to provide a guide for designing CPSPIS. Through the analysis of the SPI process model and decision support content, the major functions of CPSPIS become clear. Second, this study proposes a novel process management system to synchronise SPI resources and operations. The resources are real-time allocated, and the operations are accurately captured through the adoption of IoT technologies. The resource coordination and operation synchronisation are achieved through several self-x (self-adaptive, self-configured, etc.) services. Third, this study designs a practical domain model for managing SPI resources, operations and IoT infrastructures simply and efficiently. The three data models and the corresponding mechanisms decouple the complicated logic of the SPI process. Fourth, this study innovatively proposed an SPI performance analysis system to achieve automatic performance measurement under IoT-enabled traceability and visibility. Automated performance analysis is performed through intelligent algorithms embedded the real-time data and domain-specific knowledge. This system is of flexible extension, configuration and customisation to support various and changing criteria in SPI performance measurement. Finally, the case studies of IoT-enabled resource and operation management design, the process synchronisation system and the performance analysis system provide practical experiences of implementing IoT technologies for spare parts intralogistics in the MRO industry.