Abstract:
Military aircraft operations balance delivery pressures and engineering risks.
Aircraft structural damage incurred in-service creates complex risk decision
problems for managers deliberating maintenance activity such as delaying
rectification to continue operations, or grounding an aircraft or entire fleet. In many
operational settings, aircraft availability demands restrict the time, information, or
resources to analyse structural risks, making formal risk or decision analysis
intractable. Exact solutions are information intensive and require specialist
knowledge or machinery beyond the capabilities of generalist engineering
managers, often compelling decision-makers to use their subjective judgement in
an unsupported way. For actors deliberating aircraft maintenance structural risks
in such circumstances, a novel approach based upon heuristics, argument and
bounded rationality is proposed, which was informed by the results from a survey
of engineering practitioners and case study analyses. Testing of the approach
was carried-out with 21 aircraft engineering decision-makers with experience of
structural integrity risks, split into three groups, using realistic but fictional textual
simulations of aircraft maintenance. One group used existing decision justification approaches and were compared with a second group who provided decision
justifications using the novel approach. Users of the novel approach felt supported
and were very confident in their justifications. The third group of raters comparing
the two sets of decision justifications indicated preferences using Likert scales
against the criteria: which is easier to understand, which is more transparent,
and which gives the better justification. Analysis of the comparative results using ANOVA provided evidence that the novel approach enabled better decision
justification and transparency compared to existing approaches. The novel
approach aids decision-makers compelled to use their unsupported subjective
judgement, improving organisational resilience by improving robustness and
stretching system process to handle surprises, and providing a clear record of the
decision basis for post hoc review.
