Interconnecting heterogeneous information systems, says Dr Franck Duluc, Engineering & Maintenance Research Manager at Airbus, is a way to enable our customers to fly more with the lowest operating and maintenance costs.

In 2018, the value of the Maintenance Repair and Overhaul (MRO) market is projected to reach $140 billion (Ref: Stewart 09). To gain market share, aircraft manufacturers will have to differentiate themselves from the market norm by offering their customers a way to fly more hours with the lowest operating (exploitation) and maintenance costs.

The challenge

While considering the development of a new aircraft program and the duration of the aircraft in service phase (more than 30 years), manufacturers tend to look for the following objectives:

• Significantly shorten the development cycle to reduce costs and produce aircraft that match the latest state-of-the-art.
• Reduce pollution to achieve socially acceptable levels of environmental responsibility.
• Offer a reliable way to track and trace configurations (as-designed, as-built, as-maintained and as-flying) to ease the aircraft configuration management burden for the OEMs, MROs, airlines and operators.
• Develop turnkey and integrated solutions for reducing aircraft downtime, supplying parts when and where needed, and providing technical assistance and training to aircraft operators.
• Provide authorities with in-time relevant data for continuous airworthiness management.

In order to fulfill these objectives it is necessary to be able to retrieve and exchange relevant information between all aircraft life-cycle stakeholders. Additionally, manufacturers can obtain feedback from experience and in service data to optimize the design, reduce costs and improve environmental performance to more acceptable levels.

The solution


It was with this in mind that Airbus teamed up with aircraft manufacturers, MRO centers, information and technology providers as well as recognized laboratories to work on SIMID (Système d’Information de Maintenance Intégré et Distribué – in English ‘Integrated and Distributed Maintenance Information System’), an innovative research and development project. Launched in March 2011 for a three-year term and with an overall budget of more than $8 million (€6 million), SIMID aims to provide a demonstrator for a secure and scalable system enabling the interconnection of heterogeneous information systems as an enabler for MRO stakeholders to propose valuable services and contributing  to:

• Increased aircraft availability;
• Reduced operating and maintenance costs;
• Increased flight safety.

“Nowadays our job must go beyond helicopters sales and support. We have to follow aircraft business evolution trends in order to simultaneously help our customers in reducing their exploitation and maintenance costs while increasing our turnover and efficiency.” – EADS Eurocopter.

“The size of the Falcon fleet has significantly increased these past 10 years and will keep growing as all other business-jets fleets. MRO centers network is evolving accordingly. For Dassault Aviation, SIMID is intended to be a key differentiator to scale MRO network properly and provide efficient support with high quality standards.” – Dassault Aviation

“SIMID will help us in strengthening our partnership with our providers and customers. This will lead to the optimization of our business approach and increase our customers’ satisfaction.” – Mr. Jérôme Thulliez, Industrial & Quality Director, EQUIP’AERO SERVICES.

SIMID concept overview

SIMID Key technical challenges consist in:

SIMIDs technical approach is based on:

• Data rationalization and standardization.
• Generating connectors capable of interconnecting heterogeneous information systems such as PDM (Product Data Management), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), MIS (Maintenance Information Systems).
• Distributed data mining algorithms.

In practice

The demonstrator will be tested and validated through application to several use cases, which gather together the experiences of several MRO stakeholders.

These use cases are:

• Aircraft configuration control and management: configuration control and management is key to MRO activities as it conditions, among other things, the continuous airworthiness monitoring, the spares management and allowance, and the quality of the Technical Data.
• Aircraft repairs collection and management: airworthiness authorities are becoming increasingly stringent on the repairs recording and management.
• In-service event data collection: real-time follow-up of aircraft events will enable a faster preparation and answer to any problems that occur. Data required for decision making are often located in different places (information systems and/or stakeholders)
• Scheduled maintenance follow-up and optimization: nowadays maintenance planning update and optimization often require a heavy data collection process which can, in turn, work to the detriment of update cycles and optimization justification to the authorities. Also, with more data the different operators’ profiles may be better taken into account in the maintenance planning process.

The following tables and figure sum up the second case (aircraft repairs collection and management) as an example:

Julia	Air Alfa – Airline Maintenance Support department Aircraft exploitation – performs some aircraft maintenance and repair tasks
Bob	Beta industry – MRO center It has a contract with Air Alfa to perform their aircraft scheduled maintenance tasks and heavy repairs.
Peter	Aircraft manufacturer – Support engineering department In charge of designing a certified repair solution

SIMID use case: the stakeholders

The different use-cases have been modeled using Business Process Modeling Notation] (BPMN) and a SIMID actor has been identified enabling the identifications of the services that are to be provided through the SIMID platform. A scenario has also been described for the use-case

SIMID use case: example of Repair use-case BPMN model (SIMID action in the lower layer)


SIMID use case: example of scenario

Through this scenario (not the most complex one that might be encountered) it can be understood that a lot of people and a lot of information systems are interacting and exchanging a lot of data.

Many interfaces have to be put in place and if they are not available a lot of activity is lost in paperwork or multiple keying in within the various information systems. Also, in the case of stakeholders’ changes these interfaces often have to be rebuilt.

With the approach as defined by SIMID…

• The interaction between the different stakeholders and their information systems will be facilitated and therefore will be faster and cheaper.
• Integrating new stakeholders or services will be possible at the lowest cost.

Conclusion

After its first year, SIMID will run for two more years to define and demonstrate a solution fulfilling its objectives. All partners are contributing enthusiastically to the project and would agree with the following words from Eva Randria, 2MoRO Solutions, R&D Project – Innovation Manager: “SIMID is a turnkey solution to spread out IT MRO services in order to increase MRO stakeholders’ efficiency and competitiveness. Since our creation in 2004, our R&D team has been working on technology and services to comply with current and future Aerospace and Defense (A&D) trends. Today, we are proud to bring our experience and technology to make SIMID an upcoming reality”.