| Popis: |
Aircraft fleet managers lack tools to aid decision-making for fleets nearing retirement, which leads to rushed and ill-informed decisions. Accordingly, aging aircraft fleets are underutilized and fleets can be retired before their useful lifetime has been expended. A decision support framework is proposed to solve the aging military aircraft retirement problem. It integrates four steps for fleet managers to simplify the decision-making process: (i) Understanding the structural toll caused by utilization, (ii) Recognizing the indicators that predispose a fleet for retirement, (iii) Determining an optimal fleet size and choosing which aircraft to retire and (iv) Optimizing end-of-life usage prior to retirement. An example using a sample military fleet is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the decision support framework, integrating both computational results and manager judgement. Fleet managers were used to validate the concepts in the framework and their opinions are presented herein. It is shown that fleet managers can utilize a decision support framework to positively impact their decision-making for full-spectrum aging aircraft retirement decisions. |
