Airline Maintenance Cost Optimization Through Spare Parts Inventory Control

Abstract

Aircraft maintenance is a key factor which has a direct impact on the value and airworthiness of aircraft and plays an important role in strategical decision making which adjusts the economic performances. Managing spare parts efficiently through proper inventory controlling is critical for airlines in order to minimize total expenditure of maintenance and as a result, it has been persuasive to work further in detail on spare parts inventory controlling and optimization. The above process is followed to cater the airline production planning and a better scheduling of work can drastically minimize the maintenance cost. The research commences with studying what special practices are used to calculate demand for inventory and corresponding stock levels for the MRO activities. A comprehensive study is done on methods used to optimize spare parts inventory and efficient demand forecasting. The models presented throughout this research work are derived by studying the behavior of landing gear spare parts inventory controlling of an aircraft and can be applied to other systems’ spare parts inventory controlling too. An area of interest that has emerged is that of Rotable, Repairable, Consumable and Expendable spares, which presents scope for research. With the current forecasting methods and help of the historical data, the proposed inventory controlling policies in this research, take into consideration, the reliability concerns and forecast demands depending on spare parts data from two directions: “lead time” and “mean demand”. Hence, the optimum order number of units and ideal order period can be derived to understand the total minimization of expenditures, which results in a systematic optimization in the way of inventory controlling.