The predictive models of maintenance costs for a civil airplane

Abstract

Abstract

Airlines usually pay more attention to maintenance cost for efficiency improvement and consumption reduction. However, the airlines in the People' Republic of China have not been able to predict the maintenance cost exactly due to many uncertainties and complexities until now. In order to solve this problem, some reasonable mathematical methods are employed to build maintenance cost-forecasting models for the airlines included in this paper. Based on the analysis of the practical maintenance condition of a civil airplane, methods and tactics of economical analysis are introduced. Then, two specific methods, the project-evaluating method and the grey model GM(1, n) are employed to build maintenance cost-forecasting models. Finally, a practical case which has been carried out with the models is presented to show their effectiveness. The methods have been partly adopted by airlines, and they have proved to be helpful when successfully predicting the actual maintenance cost and when managing efficiently the maintenance fund.