Patent ID: 8126597

Claim:
A method of preventive maintenance for an aircraft, the aircraft including: a plurality of components, the components including items of equipment of the aircraft and/or electronic modules and/or physical links, wherein lifetime information for the components is known, the aircraft further including: a monitoring unit for monitoring the components, a centralized maintenance system, a digital database, an aircraft functional architecture contained in the digital database, said aircraft functional architecture specifying for each function of the functional architecture links between the respective function and the components which are needed to carry out the respective function; calculation unit for computing a function for estimating lifetime of the components, an alarm manager, and a display unit, the aircraft carrying out a set of the functions, each of the set of the functions being carried out by a chain of the components, the method comprising the steps of: locating, by the monitoring unit, degradations of at least one item of equipment; allocating the located degradations to at least one of the set of the functions of the aircraft on the basis of the links in the aircraft functional architecture; estimating a lifetime of the at least one of the set of the functions in the allocating step on the basis of the lifetime estimation function; and formulating a preventive maintenance message, the preventive maintenance message being constructed on the basis of the previous steps and of an alarms manager, the message comprising functional degradation information linked with the at least one of the set of the functions of the aircraft and estimated lifetime information of the at least one of the set of the functions.