Cyber-physical spare parts intralogistics system for aviation MRO

Spare parts management is a vital supporting function in aviation Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO). Spare parts intralogistics (SPI), the operational perspective of spare parts management, significantly affects performance of MRO activities. This paper proposes Cyber-Physical Spare Parts Intralogistics System (CPSPIS) to address the synchronization problems associated with the SPI business process and SPI resources. The proposed system applies Internet-of-Things technologies and unified representations to provide resources and operations traceability and visibility. Further, CPSPIS contributes several services with self-X abilities for real-time synchronization throughout the SPI process. The communication service in the physical layer provides a self-adaptive ability to coordinate between the physical environment and cyberspace. The tracking and tracing service uses self-configured SPI business-related functions to capture accurate real-time resource and operation data through spatial modeling and location-based components for system resource coordination. The self-organized data source integration service consolidates all SPI request sources as the starting point for process analysis. The initialization service has self-awareness capability and models the transformation between the request source and SPI operations. The self-adjusted execution service synchronizes every two operation steps using real-time resource and operation data. In addition, CPSPIS develops applications and visualization tools for real-time cooperation between execution and decision-making. A real-life case study is conducted in one of the largest aviation MRO organizations, and the quantitative and qualitative improvements of CPSPIS are discussed.