Condition-based-maintenance for fleet management

New “enlightened” and holistic maintenance strategies are shaping the industrial world from the inside, providing intelligent and focused solutions where high availability, reliability and safety are required. Maintenance planning and scheduling is an extremely daunting and multi-faceted task which involves competences from fairly different fields: customer support, quality, engineering, production, RAMS, cost estimation etc. In the aerospace sector, a significant percentage of Life Cycle Costs (LCCs) and, in particular, operating costs, are determined by Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) activities and the relative asset unavailability due to down-time or turn-around-time [1,2]. This is the reason why currently there is an ongoing intense effort in the research community and in the industry towards new maintenance strategies which could overcome the limitations of preventive maintenance thus streamlining operations, without jeopardizing mission safety. This research project is hence spot on and focuses on the development of optimized maintenance strategies, built around the system health status.