AbstractsEngineering

Aircraft maintenance comprises a significant number of activities aimed at ensuring functionality, appearance and appeal of the cabin environment. One of these activities is carpet replacement, which is routinely and frequently performed as necessitated by heavy use, which is evidenced through worn, dirty or damaged carpet sections. Removal and installation requires the carpet to be cut and fitted, both in the atelier (a hangar workshop dedicated to carpet cutting operations) and inside the aircraft. The latter situation creates issues with ergonomics and safety due to difficult working conditions. The goal of this research is to offer insights into possible improvement opportunities for KLM-E&M regarding safety and ergonomics of the employees during carpet maintenance. Hence, the main question to be answered is this research is: How can the aircraft carpet maintenance process of KLM's passenger fleet be improved in order to improve safety and ergonomics of the employees? As a first step towards answering this question, the logistics process has been specified for the complete value chain of carpet maintenance. Process mapping and quantification as well as root cause analyses have been performed to identify influencing factors and to recognize improvement opportunities in the carpet process. After problem analysis, the scope of research has been directed towards the likelihood of injury occurrence during carpet cutting in the aircraft and in the atelier. A stochastic model has been developed to describe and analyse this phenomenon. This model has been applied to carpet replacement in the Airbus A330-200, which is a representative use case at KLM-E&M. Different carpet partnumbers have been operationalized by grouping them into different categories based on their geometry and cutting pattern, after which part use data and safety occurrence data have been applied within the stochastic model to analyse the probability of injury occurrence. To test possible improvements in the carpet maintenance process, a number of alternative process scenarios have been identified. The impact of each scenario on the expected number of occurrences is calculated by varying the number of partnumbers from the categories that need to be cut inside the aircraft. The changes in the expected values show a potential significant decrease in the number of injury occurrences. However, moving cutting from the aircraft to the (capacity-constrained) carpet atelier has implications in terms of workload, leading to cost-benefit trade-offs for the maintenance operator.