A supporting framework for estimating trade-off between cost and availability at equipment level: development and application in the aircraft MRO industry

This article aims at the development of a generic framework for estimating trade-offs between cost and availability at the equipment level due to corrective maintenance in aircraft maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO). The research focuses on closed-loop learning, testing, and validating the proposed framework in a South Asian military aircraft MRO organization. The methodological development of this study is based on soft system methodology through practice-based research. A dynamic simulation has been used to represent the trade-off between availability and cost after the study of more than five hundred corrective maintenance cases for impact analysis. The developed model has been tested for the fix, Gaussian, and triangular distribution in an aircraft MRO shop to calculate the liquidity damage cost due to delivery overrun of equipment. Simulation results of multiple queues indicate that input distribution plays a significant role in the trade-off between the cost and availability of LRUs in aircraft MRO. Academically, this is the first study focussing on the impact of multiple queuing distributions on cost and equipment availability in military aircraft MRO. The proposed framework may help in more precise projection in MRO scheduling, benchmarking, and decision-making while signing the commercial contract between the original equipment manufacturer and the customer.