Expert System For Aircraft Maintenance Services Industry: Methodology and Theory
Expert System For Aircraft Maintenance Services Industry: Methodology and Theory
Expert System For Aircraft Maintenance Services Industry: Methodology and Theory
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this study is to propose an approach to facilitate the allocation of labor
resources, which is a complex and fuzzy problem existing in the aircraft maintenance services
industry. On the other hand, the shortage of experienced and qualified engineers makes the labor
allocation process even more difficult.
Design/methodology/approach – Various approaches can be used to solve this
personnel-planning problem: mathematical programming is the common modeling approach;
however, it is found to be inappropriate where there are many intangible factors. The other approach is
analytical hierarchy process (AHP), a decision support method which can facilitate labor allocation. In
this paper, the authors propose a decision support system with fuzzy AHP in weighing the importance
of different intangible criteria; an extent analysis approach is used to overcome the uncertainty of
subjective perception.
Findings – In the allocation of labor resources, the personnel plans have to consider the aviation
authority regulations and safety laws, qualification of the employees’ and customers’ requirements, as
well as other intangible variables. The analysis results have shown that the fuzzy AHP approach-based
system provides better resource management and higher productivity for the aircraft industry.
Originality/value – Since limited studies have been found to be concentrated on manpower
allocation problems in the aircraft maintenance industry, this study can provide important findings
and references to the academicians and practitioners in the related areas.
Keywords Analytical hierarchy process, Aircraft, Maintenance, Resource management
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
In this paper, the authors describe an expert system that has been developing for
aircraft maintenance department of the China Aircraft Services Limited (CASL) at
Journal of Quality in Maintenance Hong Kong International Airport. CASL is one of the aircraft service providers in Hong
Engineering Kong. The services include ground supporting services, cabin services, aircraft
Vol. 11 No. 4, 2005
pp. 348-358 maintenance services and store and supply services. The aircraft maintenance services
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited include inspections for transit, turnaround and overnight aircraft, defects rectification,
1355-2511
DOI 10.1108/13552510510626972 B747 “A” and “B” checks, Cabin maintenance including in-flight entertainment
systems, engine change and outstation maintenance support. An important Expert system
management problem to be solved in this context is to guarantee that always for maintenance
sufficient engineers with appropriate qualifications are available at the airport for
carrying out the required services. The expert system that was developed for the services
maintenance department of CASL belongs to a class of decision support system that
focus on situations, where the workload of a service can be projected some time in
advance, based on a (preferably cyclic) time table and a set of norms specifying in 349
which time intervals and how much service has to be delivered by the department. The
proposed expert system can be used to select appropriate personnel and schedule the
personnel in order to meet the demand; the focus is therefore on the personnel selection
process.
Current engineer selection process is mainly relied on the decision-maker’s own
experience without systematic approach, which is apt to be biased due to limited
personal experience, knowledge and perception (Angus et al., 2002). The short lead
time very often results in the decision-maker making intuitive decisions; forget the
viable alternatives; cannot integrate the entire maintenance strategy and tactics of an
aircraft service company. It is not effective in obtaining an optimum decision. A better
approach is required to develop systematic and comprehensive labor-selection and
planning process, which can integrate relative importance among selection criteria and
precise identification of alternatives’ performance. The method of analytical hierarchy
process (AHP) is developed for a decision support system to assist the decision-making
of maintenance labor allocation: it has the inherent capacity to handle quantitative and
qualitative criteria used in labor selection (Tam and Rao, 2000). Further more it can
help improve the decision-making process by visualizing the problem systematically in
terms of criteria and sub-criteria (Tam and Rao, 2000). The decision-maker can
compare the alternatives’ performance against certain criteria using either pair-wise
comparison or a direct grade assignment. Nevertheless, AHP cannot deal with
uncertain problems precisely because it is usually hard to give discrete grades to
uncertain criteria, which lies within certain ranges with different degrees. In order to
overcome this problem, a fuzzy AHP with an extent analysis approach is proposed to
obtain the solution by assigning triangular fuzzy numbers to identify the relative
importance of criteria and alternatives’ weighting against some criteria.
The objectives of this paper is to describe and illustrate the use of fuzzy AHP
analysis approach to improve staff allocation as well as the support of decision-making
process within the maintenance industry. Through the fuzzy AHP analysis, a list of
labor and skill selected according to priority can be determined to perform a particular
maintenance task consistent with the real situation. In Section 2, we will review the
method and their application; the construction of the model is described in Section 3;
Sections 4 and 5 provide the discussion and conclusion.
2. Literature review
2.1 Analytic hierarchy process (AHP)
AHP proposed by Saaty (1980, 1994), has recently become increasingly popular in
dealing with multi-criteria decision problems, such as selecting machines for flexible
manufacturing systems (Tabucanon et al., 1994), evaluating the implementation of a
maintenance system (Labib et al., 1998) and vendor selection of a telecommunication
system (Tam and Rao, 2000).
JQME To apply AHP, a hierarchic model is constructed first. The simplest form consists of
11,4 three levels: the goal of the decision at the top level, followed by a second level
consisting of the criteria by which the alternatives, located in the third level, will be
evaluated step by step (Saaty and Vargas, 1994) (Figure 1). It can also be extended to a
more complex model by adding more sub-criteria under a certain level of criteria. The
model is given weightings of each alternative against the decision goal by evaluating
350 the importance of criteria and also weightings of each alternative against each
sub-criteria and criteria.
After constructing the hierarchic mode, the relative importance of each criteria
against the goal and weighting of each alternative against each criteria are determined
using pair-wise comparison using five-point scale of 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 as suggested by Saaty
and Vargas (1994) (Table I). A judgment matrix is formed for these evaluation criteria,
from which the eigenvectors are calculated and aggregated to measure the final
weighting of all decision alternatives. Finally, the alternatives are ranked according to
the weightings for decision-maker to make selection decision.
Figure 1.
Simple hierarchic model of
AHP
Intensity of
importance Definition Explanation
Figure 2.
Triangular membership
functions
JQME crisp number is used to give score to describe the fuzzy importance level. For example,
11,4 “approximately equally important” can be expressed with a fuzzy set, which also
includes from 1 (equal importance) to 3 (weak importance) with different levels of
memberships. The detailed membership functions of fuzzy number are listed in
Table II.
The alternatives are also assigned triangular fuzzy number of 1; ~ 3; ~ 5;
~ 7; ~ 9~ to
352 measure their performance against to each criteria. Either pair-wise comparison or
direct assignation is used. At the same time, fuzzy ratio scales for criteria should be
defined to transfer the quantitative performance to corresponding fuzzy number.
If we assume that the fuzzy weight vector W of the selection criteria is ½W ~ j 1£n and
the fuzzy judgment matrix A of alternatives ½A1 ; A2 ; . . .Am is ½~aij m£n ; then the final
score P of alternatives can be calculated as follows:
P ¼ A^W T ð2Þ
0 1 0 1
a~ 11 a~ 12 ... a~ 1n w~ 1
B C B C
B a~ 21 a~ 22 ... a~ 2n C B w~ 2 C
B C B C
¼B C^B C
B ... C B...C
@ A @ A
a~ m1 a~ m2 . . . a~ mn w~ n
0 1
a~ 11 ^w~ 1 %~a12 ^w~ 2 %. . .%~a1n ^w~ n
B C
B ... C
B C
¼B C
B ... C
@ A
a~ m1 ^w~ 1 %~am2 ^w~ 2 %. . .~amn ^w~ n
0 1
r~1
B C
B r~2 C
B C
¼B C
B...C
@ A
r~m
In order to rank the final fuzzy scores of alternatives, a crisp total ordering from fuzzy
numbers are constructed. In this study, we selected the fuzzy mean and spread method
to defuzzify and rank the fuzzy number since human intuition would favor a fuzzy
number with higher mean value and at the same time lower spread (Lee et al., 2001):
1
Mean x~ ð~ri Þ ¼ ðl þ m þ nÞ ð5Þ
3
1 2
Standard deviation s~ð~ri Þ ¼ ðl þ m 2 þ n 2 2 lm 2 ln 2 mnÞ ð6Þ
18
354
Figure 3.
Selection criteria
5. Conclusion
In the industry of aircraft maintenance, the maintenance personnel allocation is a
complicate and important issue. How to select a suitable staff to perform a particular
maintenance task at the right time is a critical factor for the success of maintenance
service company. In this paper, a fuzzy AHP approach is proposed to facilitate this
JQME
11,4
356
Figure 4.
Ranking of 40 alternatives
after first selection process
Expert system
for maintenance
services
357
Figure 5.
Ranking of six alternatives
after second selection
process
selection process as well as improve its reliability and accuracy. The case study is used
to illustrate the selection of most suitable engineer for a particular maintenance task
using a fuzzy judgment matrix. This expert system can be extended to support and
integrate with other equipment, material and operation processes. The results indicate
that the system provides better resource management and higher productivity for the
aircraft industry.
References
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Labib, A.W., O’Connor, R.F. and Williams, G.B. (1998), “Effective maintenance system using the
analytic hierarchy process”, Integrated Manufacturing Systems, Vol. 9 No. 2, pp. 87-98.
JQME Lee, W.B., Lau, H., Liu, Z.Z. and Tam, S. (2001), “A fuzzy analytic hierarchy process approach in
modular product design”, Expert Systems, Vol. 18 No. 1, pp. 32-42.
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358 Saaty, T.L. (1980), The Analytic Hierarchy Process, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY.
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Further reading
Alfares, H.K. (1999), “Aircraft maintenance workforce scheduling: a case study”, Journal of
Quality in Maintenance Engineering, Vol. 5 No. 2, pp. 78-88.
Triantaphyllou, E. (2000), Multi-criteria Decision-Making Methods: A Comparative Study, Kluwer
Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.