On the availability of the CH149 Cormorant fleet

Abstract

The CH149 Cormorant is the Canadian Forces (CF) designation for the AgustaWestland EH101, the Canadian Air Force's only dedicated search and rescue (SAR) helicopter. Since its procurement, the availability for operations of the CH149 fleet has been less than what was initially predicted. This study was undertaken to determine if the low serviceability of the fleet was due to its maintenance programme. A discrete-event simulation model was created to determine the number of aircraft available at any given time during a simulation run, assuming an ideal sparing situation. Analysis indicates that the current fleet cannot operate from four (or even three) Main Operating Bases (MOBs) in an ideal sparing situation, implying that the fleet's availability problem cannot theoretically be solved simply by addressing the logistical problem of the spares.

OR in spare parts management: A review

“…Most of the traditional inventory control models are based on the assumption of ample repair capacity, which can introduce a serious underestimation of the spare parts requirements in systems with high repair facility utilization (Diaz & Fu (1997)). Several contributions (Costantino et al (2013) Sleptchenko et al (2002Sleptchenko et al ( , 2005, Lau & Song (2004, 2008) carried out studies of how finite repair capacity affects inventory systems, and developed models for multi-echelon repairable item inventory systems with limited repair capacity to reduce stock investment. The relevant studies showed that the proposed models in the case of limited repair capacity significantly outperform traditional models, such as METRIC and VARI-METRIC.…”

“…model can evaluate the need for contract maintenance and the impact of spare parts availability on various measures of performance. Pall (2008) proposed a discrete-event simulation model to evaluate aircraft availability at any given time during a simulation run, assuming an ideal sparing situation, and showed that the fleet's availability cannot be solved simply by addressing the logistical problem of the spares. Rossetti & Thomas (2006) presented a standardized, object-oriented, data-driven, simulation framework for evaluating a multi-echelon multi-indenture spare parts supply chain network.…”