HEURISTICS FOR MULTICOMPONENT JOINT REPLACEMENT - APPLICATIONS TO AIRCRAFT ENGINE MAINTENANCE

This paper considers the maintenance of aircraft engine components whe re economies exist for joint replacement because (a) the aircraft must be pulled from service for maintenance and (b) repair of some compone nts requires removal and disassembly of the engine. It is well known t hat the joint replacement problem is difficult to solve exactly, becau se the optimal solution does not have a simple structured form. Theref ore, we formulate three easy-to-implement heuristics and test their pe rformance against a lower bound for various numerical examples. One of our heuristics, the base interval approach, in which replacement cycl es for all components are restricted to be multiples of a specified in terval, is shown to be robustly accurate. Moreover, this heuristic is consistent with maintenance policies used by commercial airlines in wh ich periodic maintenance checks are made at regular intervals. (C) 199 8 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 45: 435-458, 1998.