Prognostics applied to aircraft line maintenance: Brake wear prediction based on Bayesian Networks

The aeronautics industry is attempting to implement important changes to its maintenance strategy. The corrective and preventive maintenance practise is evolving to predictive maintenance to minimize the cost of the maintenance support and to increase operational reliability and availability. The main objective of the article is to show the new predictive maintenance concept and the usefulness of Bayesian networks in supporting the intelligent function “decision support”. This function provides specific models for the prediction of degradation in some of the critical components of the aircraft, the basis for the new maintenance strategy concept based on prognosis. In addition, the article discusses the development of the Bayesian network model for the specific case of predicting brake wear.