A Micro-task Cyber-Physical System for Material Delivery in Aviation Maintenance

Abstract

In aviation maintenance, effective material delivery ensures maintenance services. Compared to traditional material delivery, material delivery in aviation maintenance has several features. Firstly, materials are of multiple categories with small quantities and different volumes. Secondly, the usage of components should be non-replaceable items in the material request with corresponding old parts recycling from the airplanes. Thirdly, materials need to be prepared and delivered to the right destination to meet the strict aviation maintenance schedules in short target time. Fourthly, multi-level of workstations make the workflows complex and change frequently. Three problems significantly influence the material delivery process in the current situation. Lack of real-time information in the process comes as the first problem. Only materials in the inventory are known to the operators without any on-going status or location information. The second problem is unable to fulfill the high time accuracy of all the material requests. Material delivery delays quite often, and the delay leads to additional effort to deal with many material request canceling. The final problem is fixed workflows. These non-configurable workflows result in the growing number of workflows of overlap steps in the current system and reduce operational flexibility. This paper proposed a Micro-task Cyber-Physical System (MtCPS) to solve these problems. It consists of three core components: Location Tracking System (LTS), Mobile Operation System (MOS), and Backend Control and Monitor System (BCMS). LTS applies IoT technologies, including GPS and indoor positioning technology, to build up a physical location system. MOS splits the aviation material delivery process into standard micro tasks using mobile wearable devices to create a re-engineering process. Both of LTS and MOS build up the connection between the cyber system and the physical system. BCMS implements a finite state machine (FSM) to enables the flexibility, configuration and sourcing of the workflows.