A Decision-Making Framework for the KC-46A Maintenance Program

SUMMARY & CONCLUSIONSThis paper provides a Decision-Making Framework to evaluate KC-46A scheduled maintenance task effectiveness. This framework is the foundation of the KC-46A Maintenance Effectiveness Decision Engine (K-MEDE). K-MEDE is projected to inform KC-46A System Program Office (SPO) management decisions in achieving sustainment objectives related to reliability, maintainability, and availability.The need to design synergies between the federated and manually-driven United States Air Force (USAF) sustainment enterprises entails a heuristic knowledge engine to serve as a decision support tool in the KC-46A Continuous Analysis and Surveillance System (CASS) program. This tool, K-MEDE, is planned to be applied to several maintenance tasks on the KC-46A A-Check inspection to demonstrate improvement in the state of the art. Projected research results significantly reduce the time required to perform CASS analysis and enable continuous monitoring of corrective actions to improve maintenance performance.This performance is asserted to be a function of the KC-46A sustainment enterprise behaving as a modern defense industrial system that interfaces with its internal and extended enterprises [ 8 – 10 ]. This system produces mission-capable aircraft and its activities and relationships are significantly governed by the KC-46A maintenance program. Multi-criteria decision making in the KC-46A maintenance program involves an intricate web of operational and readiness requirements, resource constraints, and multi-domain enterprise considerations.This framework intends to manage these complexities by connecting Enterprise Systems Engineering (ESE) and decision support applications to achieve near optimal decisions for the KC-46A maintenance program. Given that the KC-46A is a Boeing 767 (B767) derivative, participation in the commercial spare parts pool, regulatory environment driven by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and maintenance, repair, and overhaul services market was projected to achieve readiness objectives [6] and realize a $420M savings in KC-46A lifecycle costs [4].