Zephyrnet Logo

Why is aircraft maintenance scheduling moving away from Microsoft Excess & Access?

Date:

An aeronautical product, according to Regulation (EU) 2018/1139, is an aircraft, engine, or propeller. However, for each of these products to be used, they must comply with certification and airworthiness requirements. This process, despite its descriptive simplicity, is often very complicated and time-consuming for aircraft manufacturers. The acronym RAMS defines the behaviour of an aeronautical product, which must comply with the following characteristics:

  • Reliability denotes the capacity to perform a specific function without any failure.
  • Availability refers to the ability to maintain a functioning state in the given environment.
  • Maintainability means the capacity to be “easily” maintained.
  • Safety refers to the ability to not harm people or the environment during the entire life cycle.

The supply chain

In broad outline, the manufacturing process of an aircraft is as follows:

  1. The raw material supplier supplies the materials.
  2. The Supplier Tier 2 creates a component (for example a leg of the main gear).
  3. The Supplier Tier 1 assembles a system (e.g. the entire main gear).
  4. The Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) assembles everything, along with all other aircraft systems.

The Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) is the aircraft manufacturer (e.g. Boeing or Airbus), which then (after certification through the aviation regulator) sells its aviation product to customers, i.e. airlines, national agencies, or individuals.

General aerospace supply chain.

Once sold, the aircraft begins to fly and is inevitably subject to ageing. For this reason, after a certain number of flight hours it must be rechecked, and then it must enter maintenance.

The birth of Robin RAMS software

Usually, an aircraft will enter scheduled maintenance without ever having had problems, since in almost all cases, the aircraft suffers failures that must be recorded, cataloged, and analyzed, both to avoid them later, and to understand if that failure is very likely or unlikely to happen.

A useful system for reporting, classifying, analyzing failures, and planning corrective actions in response to those failures is called FRACAS, the acronym of Failure Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action System. In the aerospace industry, many companies perform FRACAS with common tools such as Microsoft Excel or Access, which soon become too slow and unreliable for the amount of data stored. For this reason, DMD Solutions came up with the idea of Robin RAMS software, delivered for the first time in May 2018, with the FRACAS module.

DMD Solutions is an engineering company located in Barcelona (Spain) and Luzern (Switzerland) founded in 2014, that provides engineering services in the field of Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, and Safety (RAMS).

Robin RAMS logo. Photo by DMD Solutions.

Since this point, Robin has become increasingly comprehensive, adding new modules and building a fully-fledged RAMS software suite focused on aerospace certification needs.

Recent Developments

On March 2, 2021, DMD Solutions released a new update to its flagship software with which it is now easier to manage a certification project, from early design to continued airworthiness.

Robin’s development timeline and version release. Photo by DMD Solutions.

The new features of the new 1.2 release of Robin RAMS, are:

  • Hamornised failure rate for the whole RAMS cycle.
  • New Global parts management. Each system component, identified by Part Number has a globally unique identifier for all modules.
  • New Calculation interface by integrating the datasets licensed by North American company Quanterion Solutions Incorporated.
  • Improved algorithm for Fault Tree probability calculations based on innovative technology developed by DMD Solutions.

The new features of Robin RAMS 1.2 will be demonstrated online in an Open Demo on March 11, where all industry professionals are invited to attend.

Checkout PrimeXBT
Trade with the Official CFD Partners of AC Milan
The Easiest Way to Way To Trade Crypto.
Source: https://aeronewsx.com/why-is-aircraft-maintenance-scheduling-moving-away-from-microsoft-excess-access/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-is-aircraft-maintenance-scheduling-moving-away-from-microsoft-excess-access

spot_img

Latest Intelligence

spot_img