Patent ID: 11907913
Assignee: THE BOEING COMPANY
Field: IT methods for management (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G  B | IPC B  G

Claim 10:
11. A method of maintaining an aircraft from a plurality of aircraft of a type of aircraft that includes a plurality of aircraft parts, the method comprising:
receiving, via processing circuitry of an electronic device, at least one series of observations related to the aircraft from at least one source of data in communication with the electronic device;
accessing, via the processing circuitry of the electronic device, a first time series of observations of first variables that describe in-service operation of the aircraft, including for a plurality of flights of the aircraft, flight plans, and geographic locations, operational context and status of the aircraft;
accessing, via the processing circuitry of the electronic device, a second time series of observations of second variables that describe maintenance of the aircraft, including a maintenance history of the aircraft, historical orders of replacement aircraft parts for respective aircraft parts of the plurality of aircraft parts, and historical time to replace the respective aircraft parts with the replacement aircraft parts;
accessing, via the processing circuitry of the electronic device, a third time series of observations of third variables that describe at least one of weather or terrain in an environment of the aircraft during the in-service operation and the maintenance of the aircraft;
determining, via the processing circuitry of the electronic device, a behavior model of the type of aircraft that is trained to predict demand for the replacement aircraft parts from a training set of observations the first variables, the second variables, and the third variables across the plurality of aircraft of the type of aircraft, the behavior model implemented as a directed acyclic graph of machine learning models that are connected to one another, an output of a first of the machine learning models fed to as input to a second of the machine learning models;
applying, via the processing circuitry of the electronic device, the first time series, the second time series and the third time series to the behavior model to predict the demand for the replacement aircraft parts;
creating, via the processing circuitry of the electronic device, a plan for acquisition of the replacement aircraft parts, and maintenance of the aircraft in which the respective aircraft parts are replaced with the replacement aircraft parts, based on the demand as predicted; and
executing the plan, created via the processing circuitry of the electronic device, to maintain the aircraft.