COST AND BENEFIT OF SCHEDULED STRUCTURAL HEALTH MONITORING FOR COMMERCIAL AIRCRAFT

Structural health monitoring (SHM) has been discussed as a promising solution to improve the cost and safety performance of aircraft since the 1950s. However, its current use in commercial aviation is still limited to field tests due to an unclear business case. To this end, the work at hand contributes to the understanding of the business case connected to structural health monitoring in commercial aviation by conducting an integrated cost-benefit study. This study considers a geometric approximation of a selected reference aircraft, airframe fatigue as primary driver for scheduled structural inspections, generalized SHM performance represented by a receiver operator characteristic curve, SHM equipment weight, fuel burn, lost revenue due to decreased payload capacity and decreased airframe weight due to the perspective removal of access panels. It shows that the use of SHM during scheduled inspections can improve the overall operating cost of the considered reference aircraft. However, the existence and magnitude of a benefit depends heavily on the SHM equipment weight, monitoring performance and installation cost of the respective SHM system.