AERO2347 - Airworthiness and Aircraft Maintenance Assignment

Assignment Task

Overview of Assignment

As part of your postgraduate studies, being able to critically read, reflect on and synthesize existing scientific literature are highly valuable skills. In addition, the ability to conduct, generate, structure and report on scientific research will be necessary when performing any research independently as a postgraduate. In light of this, this assignment is configured to acquaint you with these skills by writing a scientific paper on your own. Furthermore, this assignment is embedded into the Aircraft Maintenance Management course by focusing its scope towards state of the art research in aircraft maintenance.

The aim of this assignment is to write a scientific paper on a particular topic - of your own choice - within the scope of aircraft maintenance. In this paper, you will either need to explore a novel contribution to the state of the art, or critically examine, synthesize and reflect upon the current academic state of the art. This is an individual assessment task; the assignment is to be completed by each student individually.

Consult with your course coordinator if you have any questions related to the assessment

Assignment Breakdown

You are to explore a topic of your choice within the aircraft maintenance domain in depth, providing an opportunity to showcase your ability to reflect critically upon the state of the art, and synthesize novel insights accordingly.

Note that you are free to suggest your own topic of choice (or a specific topic within the provided set below). Be sure to align with the lecturer. As a guideline, the following topics can be considered:

• Maintenance planning optimization
• Composites
  • Training
  • Access to knowledge about products and processes
• Condition-based Maintenance (CBM) / predictive maintenance / Prognostics and Health Management (PHM)
  • Applicability of CBM / PHM (technical & economic feasibility)
  • Diagnostics / prognostics for systems and/or structures
• Big data
  • System availability versus diagnostic & prognostic capability
  • Fleet data management
  • Interoperability issues
• Paper-based to paperless organisation
  • Legacy tools & systems
  • Phase-out of aircraft
  • System interoperability
• VR / AR in maintenance

With respect to your topic of choice, the individual assignment focuses on writing an academic paper that pertains to a topic within the wider domain of aircraft maintenance. This paper can be of various types (as prevalent in academic literature):

• Original research paper: aimed at producing a novel addition to the scientific body of work. Typically investigates a new model or method aimed at proving / disproving a hypothesis, or set thereof. Often builds on previous work, relaxing one or more assumptions to increase the applicability of an existing model or method. Typical content includes a clear problem statement, overview of state of the art, model / method, results and analysis, and validation.
• Review paper: aimed at reviewing the state of the art with respect to a research topic. Typically evaluates a sizeable set of literature, identifying main contributions, trends and research challenges in said topic. Typical content includes identification / definition of research topic and its main concepts, main contributions, trends (synthesis) and shortcomings, leading into a research agenda for the future.
• Reproduction paper: aimed at reproducing prior research work; these papers are quite rare in published literature. Typical content includes problem statement, short state of the art section, specification of the (reproduced) model and dataset, results generation and comparison with respect to prior research.

All three options are valid choices for this assignment, but experience shows that the review paper is most feasible given the time constraints of the assignment. A couple of notes:

1) When choosing the original research paper, pay heed to the fact that you do not have much time to build and test a full model. I would advise you to scope your research down to a fairly straightforward topic and research question that can be tested using limited effort.

2) When choosing the review paper, note that the body of your work will consist of critical reflection on existing literature. This means you’ll have to pick a topic that has sufficient literature to start with – for a good review paper in this assignment, you will need to review at least 5 relevant papers, and preferably more. Note that actual review papers will typically consider >100 papers. 

3) You may choose to adopt the reproduction paper format when you lack the inspiration, time or prior research experience to go for a novel contribution. However, reconstructing a model and obtaining the original research data for reproduction may be challenging – be sure to pick a suitably ‘manageable’ paper for reproduction.

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