Spares provisioning strategy for periodically replaced units within the fleet retirement period

Within aviation enterprises, the process of dismantling an aircraft at the end of its life is referred to as parting-out. Obviously, the asset value of the units and materials parted out from the retired airframes can be considerable. The benchmarked best practice within the aviation industry is to dismantle the retired aircraft and use the parted-out spares to support the remaining fleet or to offer them on the surplus market. Part-out-based spares provisioning (PBSP) has been a major focus of attention for aviation companies. The PBSP approach is a complex task that requires a multidisciplinary and integrated decision-making process. In order to control the stock level and fulfil the decision criteria within PBSP, it is necessary to make decisions on the termination, at specific times, of both the parting-out process and the maintenance and repair actions performed on the units. This paper considers repairable units and introduces a computational model to identify the applicable alternatives for repair termination times that will minimize the number of remaining spares at the end of the retirement period, while fulfilling the availability requirement for spares during the PBSP period, at the lowest possible cost. The feasible alternatives are compared with regard to their respective costs, and the most cost-effective solution is selected. The cost model uses estimates of future maintenance requirements, the turn-around times, and the cost of the various maintenance tasks, the future spares consumption, and the estimated salvage of spares from retired aircraft. The output of the model is a set of applicable alternatives which satisfy the availability requirements for spares for the active fleet. The method is illustrated using a case study performed on the Saab-105 training aircraft.