Predictive aircraft maintenance: modeling and analysis using stochastic Petri nets

Predictive aircraft maintenance is a complex process, which requires the modeling of the stochastic degradation of aircraft systems, as well as the dynamic interactions between the stakeholders involved. In this paper, we show that the stochastically and dynamically colored Petri nets (SDCPNs) are able to formalize the predictive aircraft maintenance process. We model the aircraft maintenance stakeholders and their interactions using local SDCPNs. The degradation of the aircraft systems is also modeled using local SDCPNs where tokens change their colors according to a stochastic process. These SDCPN models are integrated into a unifying SDCPN model of the entire aircraft maintenance process. We illustrate our approach for the maintenance of multi-component systems with k-out-of-n redundancy. Using SDCPNs and Monte Carlo simulation, we analyze the number of maintenance tasks and potential degradation incidents that the system is expected to undergo when using a remaining useful life(RUL)-based predictive maintenance strategy. We compare the performance of this predictive maintenance strategy against other maintenance strategies that rely on fixed-interval inspection tasks to schedule component replacements. The results show that by conducting RUL-based predictive maintenance, the number of unscheduled maintenance tasks and degradation incidents is significantly reduced.