Balancing preventive and corrective maintenance of
aircraft assets: a cyber-physical systems approach
Marco Andreacchio 1,3, Abdelghani Bekrar 2,3, Rachid Benmansour 2, Damien Trentesaux 2,3
1
EAM Worldwide, United Arab Emirates
2
LAMIH UMR CNRS 8201, University of Valenciennes and Hainaut-Cambrésis
Le Mont Houy, F-59313 Valenciennes Cedex 9, France
3
Surferlab, Distributed Intelligence for Transportation Systems Laboratory
Le Mont Houy, F-59313 Valenciennes Cedex 9, France
Abstract—Many aircraft assets are subjected to both
preventive (scheduled) and corrective (un-scheduled)
replacement tasks to ensure adequate reliability and
availability. The problem under this approach, particularly
for assets that exist in high quantities, is that preventive
replacement tasks will often require removal of the entire
population of assets from the aircraft regardless as to
whether any of them were replaced on a corrective basis
beforehand. To avoid the costs associated with premature
asset removal, this article fosters the use of a Cyber-
Physical Systems approach to the management of aircraft
assets underpinned by Radio Frequency Identification
(RFID) technology. This will allow the identification of
assets based on their installation date (whether being due to
a corrective or preventive installation), meaning that only
the required assets are removed during the preventive
replacement task. This allows the preventive replacement
task to be performed more efficiently, also allowing the
scheduling and planning of the task to be improved. An
example in the context of aircraft passenger seat covers is
used to illustrate our proposal.
Keywords—Preventive; Corrective; Aircraft; Seat Cover;
Maintenance; Cyber-Physical Systems; e-Enabled Aircraft
I. INTRODUCTION
The air transport industry is characterized by high fixed
costs and low profit margins [1]. Aircraft maintenance is a vital
yet expensive function and on average it represents
approximately 12% of total operating costs within any given
airline [2]. Maintenance Repair, and Overhaul (MRO)
organizations seek to maximize aircraft availability,
operability, and item level reliability [3] in order to maintain a
competitive advantage. However, for every dollar spent on
aircraft maintenance in average terms, airlines still continue to
hold approximately one dollar of spares and inventory [4]. This
is arguably excessive. As a result, there is a continuous interest
to devise maintenance policies that improve inventory
management and better utilize aircraft assets during
maintenance checks. In this article, we consider assets
characterized by a large number of identical replaceable
elements inside each aircraft, such as seat covers, floor panels,
978-1-5090-2870-2/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
insulation blankets, curtains, linens, and onboard tapestries
whose replacements must be decided for one or several of these
elements. For these assets, we suggest a Cyber-Physical
System (CPS) solution that will enable improved balancing of
preventive and corrective maintenance tasks. Implementation
allows for better asset utilization (where possible), and a
reduction in replacement costs. As a first step to achieving this,
the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is
proposed. This paper presents a feasibility study towards the
deployment of a full CPS using RFID as a first implementation
step. A simple case study will be presented in the context of
aircraft passenger seat covers and relevant gains using RFID
will be estimated through simulation.
II. PROBLEM STATEMENT
The wear and deterioration of the cabin interior depends on
aircraft utilization [5]. Airlines that operate aircraft with higher
flight hours and cycles in particular allocate considerable
resources to maintaining cabin appearance.
Aircraft maintenance checks are scheduled and packaged in
a variety of ways. They are mostly referred to as an A-check,
B-check, C-check, or D-check. ‘A-checks’ are usually
scheduled every 500 to 600 flight-hours, and take
approximately 20 to 50 man-hours to complete. ‘C-checks’ are
heavier in nature and preformed approximately every 6,000
flight hours, or every 24 months [6]. They may take up to 1–2
weeks to complete. ‘D-Checks’ are even lengthier. During
these checks a range of corrective and preventive maintenance
activities may be performed that require a varying amount of
ground time to complete.
Corrective maintenance is reactionary and can occur on an
unscheduled basis. It is the repair or replacement of an asset
after a defected fault has taken place. Corrective maintenance
is generally carried out after the failure of an aircraft asset, and
the objective is to restore it to a functioning state as soon as
possible, either by repair or replacement [7].
Preventive maintenance on the other hand occurs on a
scheduled basis [3] and is intended to reduce the probability of
asset failure or degradation. Preventive maintenance in this
sense requires assets to have an defined expected life span or
measurable degradation [8] at which they are required to be
replaced accordingly.
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 Aircraft assets are subjected to various forms of preventive
or corrective maintenance. Indeed, many assets require both
condition-based and time-based replacements, meaning that
corrective and preventive maintenance regimes are
simultaneously applicable. The problem is that between two
preventive replacement tasks, a particular individual asset may
undergo a corrective replacement. When this is the case, next
scheduled preventive replacement task may not necessarily
take into account whether or not that asset has been changed on
corrective basis shortly before the preventive replacement task
has taken place.
For example, Scenario A in Figure I depicts a particular
asset (referred to as i1) that requires a scheduled preventive
replacement. Here, a 4-month preventive replacement interval
(T=4) is shown with no corrective replacements required. In
Scenario B, the same asset i1 encounters a failure event after
2.5 months and requires an unscheduled corrective
replacement immediately. This asset (referred to as i2) was
only installed for 1.5 months until it was replaced again at the
4-month (T=4) preventive inspection interval corresponding to
the original installation date of i1. Assuming that the asset in
Scenario B has some kind of maximum overhaul limit, then
premature removal will also represent underutilization costs.
FIGURE I
GRAPHICAL DEPICTION OF AN ASSET REPLACEMENT CYCLE
SCENARIO A i1 SCENARIO B
i2
4 months
1.5 months
2.5 months
III. INDUSTRIAL AND ACADEMIC STATE OF THE
ART REVIEW
Usually, when rotable or repairable aircraft assets are
scheduled for routine maintenance, flight operators transfer
maintenance activities to third party repair organisations [9].
As this takes place, access may be required to the back to birth
data, as well as historical maintenance and traceability records.
This level of visibility is currently achieved by providing
manual, paper-based documentation. It has been identified that
manual record keeping is inefficient [10] and can precipitate
data mishandling [11, 12] particularly inside legacy paper
based systems. The literature on maintenance policies has been
surveyed [13] especially with respect to stochastic failure [14]
and for deteriorating systems [15], as well as optimizing
preventive maintenance and corrective maintenance [16-18].
In this context, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) seem to be a
very promising approach. CPS are integrations of computation
and physical processes [19] and particular attention has been
given to the potential benefits of integrating CPS in the aircraft
maintenance environment [20-25].
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We thus consider that a natural extension to improving
aircraft maintenance is the e-Enabled aircraft with self serving
assets [26, 27] in order to improve the dynamic information
flows of aircraft assets. RFID positioning and optimization
models have also been discussed [28]. In the available
scientific literature, optimization replacement models and
methods are addressed general terms [29] and also in terms of
aircraft maintenance [30] but are seldom addressed particularly
with respect to CPS and sensor-based technologies.
We propose that CPS-based maintenance would be able to
keep track of the installation date for assets that are subject to
both preventive and corrective maintenance. The benefits
would be a reduction in premature asset removal, allowing for
improved scheduling, and eventually the merging of preventive
and corrective replacement tasks. This would allow for
improved asset utilization, and lower costs with maintenance
inspections. The following part details this proposal.
IV. SPECIFYING THE USE OF CPS TO BALANCE
PREVENTIVE AND CORRECTIVE REPLACEMENTS
Under our proposal, each asset would have an individual
sensor on it, and would become an active Cyber-Physical part
of a greater CPS system. It would communicate the data via an
onboard interrogator to the central Maintenance Information
System (MIS) so that a task can be scheduled and that
maintenance engineers would know exactly which asset to
replace when the task is scheduled.
Implementing such a full CPS system is not realistic unless
some first steps towards digitization of industrial practices are
led. Among these, identification and localization of each asset
is a key step. For that purpose, RFID sensor technologies are
suitable for a future CPS implementation. This is because there
is guidance that allows for the installation of RFID in the
aircraft [31-33] as well as standardized data usage [34] of
RFID in the aviation industry.
When an RFID-enabled asset is installed to a location during
a replacement task, then it is assigned to the location with a
timestamp. Then, during the next maintenance task (whether it
be preventive or corrective), the engineer is able to walk down
the aisle and identify the timestamp of each asset installment.
By doing so, the RFID scanner would be able to compute
whether each asset has enough life to make it to the next
scheduled replacement task based on the maximum permissible
onboard life. This means that during the preventive
replacement task, maintenance personnel would only be
required to change the assets where the remaining permissible
onboard life is less than the preventive replacement inspection
interval. The other assets that have been changed more recently
from the corrective replacement would not get unnecessarily
removed, thus leading to possible substantial financial gains.
With RFID, the inspection interval may be retimed, however
with CPS as the next step ahead, both corrective and preventive
replacement tasks can be integrated together. The real time
cooperative and self-scheduling ability of the asset would mean
that replacement tasks can be integrated into smaller packages
and requiring less man hours and therefore can be carried out in
smaller time windows when the aircraft is available.
 In Figure II, Scenario C illustrates a normal aircraft asset
(referred to as i3) that is subjected to a preventive inspection
interval of 4 months with no corrective replacements. In
Scenario D, the CPS-enabled asset encounters a failure event
after 2.5 months, and the preventive 4-month (T=4) scheduled
interval is reset to the date of installation of the asset i3 in
Scenario D.
Obviously, the focus here is set here on a single asset, but
important long-term benefits could emerge from integrating
cooperative behaviors as previously explained.
FIGURE II
GRAPHICAL DEPICTION OF A CPS-BASED ASSET REPLACEMENT CYCLE
SCENARIO C i3 SCENARIO D
i4
4 months
4 months
2.5 months
Aviation Administration. This includes aircraft interior seat
cushions and upholstery [35]. Aircraft passenger seat covers
contain a fire retardant in order to meet the flammability
requirements, and this fire retardant degrades proportionally
with the number of times that it has been washed or dry-
cleaned.
As a result, many aircraft passenger seat covers are often
only permitted to be dry-cleaned a finite number of times (as
specified by the seat cover manufacturer) and once they have
reached the maximum number of wash cycles, they must be
discarded [36].
Therefore, early (or premature) removal of the seat cover
from the aircraft cabin decreases its usable life therefore
representing underutilization costs. The following part details
the application of our proposal on the specific case of with a
conceptual diagram depicted in Figure III. In this figure, T is
the cycle time that is the periodicity of the preventive
maintenance, X(i,t) is a binary variable equal to 1 if the asset i
is changed by preventive maintenance at period t and Y(i,t) is a
binary variable equal to 1 if the asset i is changed by corrective
maintenance at period t.
FIGURE III
CONCEPTUAL DIAGRAM OF CPS-BASED MAINTENANCE

Y (i, t)
From these specifications, some scientific issues remain to
Aircraft completes Continuous sensing or scanning using RFID.
be solved. These issues can be structured according the flight cycles. Seat Decision is made whether to change seat
following questions; covers require changing
on a corrective basis.
cover on a corrective basis or to defer it to
next preventive maintenance interval.
Will not exceed onboard limit and
• Due to the reduction in time to perform the preventive i1 does not require replacement
check, to what extent can the preventive replacement i2 Has already exceeded onboard
limit and requires replacement
interval be rescheduled to a shorter interval? Will exceed onboard limit
i3 and requires replacement

• If probability distribution of corrective replacements is i4 Missing or not

scanned correctly
known for a given time period, then how can the
Cyber-Physical
benefits be quantified due to increased asset Data Cloud
utilization?
X (i, t) Central CPS monitors values
and ascertains preventive
When preventive maintenance interval.
An illustrative example is presented to highlight the use of maintenance is
performed, then our X (i, t + s · T ) = 1
CPS on specific assets, and to show the pertinence facing the approach enables the
industrial reality. The choice for this asset and the relevant changeover of only seat
covers that need it.
industrial context is firstly introduced.
VI. CONCLUSION
V. AIRCRAFT PASSENGER SEAT COVERS
CPS-based maintenance has the potential to be a value
Aircraft passenger seat covers are designed to protect the proposition for any airline seeking to improve the quality and
seat cushion from accidental or deliberate wear and tear. Seat effectiveness of a range of replacement tasks as well as
covers are installed in the aircraft either on a corrective or improving the costs associated with maintaining aircraft cabin
preventive basis. The problem with the current status quo is appearance. This article presented a study aiming at estimating
that seat covers are assets for which there is little visibility into the feasibility to implement in the near future a full CPS system
the installation dates on an individual basis. The preventive for the optimal maintenance of aircraft assets underpinned by
time based replacement therefore specifies that all seat covers RFID as a first step.
should be changed. This yields proportionally high costs in
terms of stripping off the seat cover, processing it, and washing The conclusion (which is to be confirmed by real
it unnecessarily. Aircraft passenger seat covers also may have a experiments) is that it is worth studying the impact of CPS-
finite number of times in which they can be washed. based maintenance on seat covers as well as other aircraft
International standards regulate protection against fire onboard assets. Our approach has been designed in a generic way and
the aircraft, and certain materials installed in the aircraft cabin may be extended to other aircraft assets. The findings in this
must meet flammability criteria prescribed by the Federal article form the basis for further research.

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 VII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Surferlab is partially funded by ERDF (European Regional
Development Fund). The authors wish to thank the European
Union and the Nord–Pas-de-Calais in France region for their
support.
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