KBSI is developing a roadmap for depot information integration and situation based planning, scheduling, and control system support. KBSI is taking a scientific approach, studying the MRO environment, its fundamental nature, the underlying physics of MRO operations and processes-planning, scheduling, execution, control—the issues of dealing with aging workloads, and the processes that perform the repair.
The driving principle at the core of the Sustainment Technologies for Aircraft Depot Maintenance (S-Physics) initiative, now in Phase III, is that planning and scheduling in a depot maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) environment is a unique activity. Manufacturing systems make explicit the need for prior planning: i.e., the coordination of resources prior to the initiation of the work. Manufacturing systems assume that the lead-time to perform the coordination of resources (whether it be an acquisition activity, worker training, etc.) can be described and used in determining the appropriate schedules used by shops and management for setting baselines, tracking work, and setting budgets. In the MRO environment, however, these systems prove inadequate. The information managed by such systems is insufficient, and maintained at the wrong level of granularity does not incorporate knowledge of the true state of repair (with respect to work or resources) as well as provides faulty baselines based on infeasible plans and therefore schedules and provides skewed estimates of the resource requirements necessary to complete a given workload.
