Dynamic Programming-Based Spare Parts Control for AEW Aircraft Mission Systems

Abstract

To address the challenges of time-varying spare parts demand, limited support resources, and the strong coupling between failure rates and mission operating conditions in the mission electronics system of the U.S. E-2D carrier-based Airborne Early Warning (AEW) aircraft under multi-phase operational mission profiles, this paper proposes a dynamic programming-based multi-phase optimal control method for spare parts management. First, based on the publicly available system architecture of the E-2D, a complete operational mission is discretized into four phases (early warning detection, target tracking, command and guidance, and return-to-standby) and a mission-driven multi-phase spare parts state transition model is established. Second, to overcome the limitation of traditional spare parts models that neglect the dynamic influence of mission operating conditions on failure rates, a Mission-Environment-State (MES) triple-coupled failure rate correction mechanism is proposed. Built upon the Weibull baseline failure model, this mechanism introduces a mission urgency factor, an extended Arrhenius environmental stress coefficient, and a power-law state degradation factor to achieve real-time dynamic correction of failure rates.