Automation of Aircraft Maintenance Risk Assessment Using a Parametric Geometry Modeler

Maintainability is an important criterion in aircraft design, affecting customer satisfaction and operating costs. Efforts have been made to address some aspects of maintainability earlier during the aircraft development and system integration process; however, most of the proposed methods require substantial human input and are not well suited for integration with a Multidisciplinary Design Analysis and Optimization (MDAO) framework. Within the challenge of automation lies the need for a link between a geometric modeler and the maintainability analysis tool. This paper describes a method for automating a score-based maintainability assessment method, requiring three-dimensional (3D) geometry using Engineering Sketch Pad (ESP) and Computational Analysis Prototype Syntheses (CAPS). The authors propose and implement the analysis in Python by linking the analysis tool with the geometry using CAPS to extract the required data for further computations. The paper presents a validation of the method using maintenance risk scores from a previous work requiring a 3D model and demonstrates functionality by applying the approach to analyze aircraft equipment bays. The results from the automation show similarity with those obtained when computing risk scores manually, and the effect of component layout on computational time is addressed. The automated analysis enables the evaluation of multiple aircraft equipment bay configurations efficiently and quickly.