Integration of RFID technologies in helicopter maintenance processes

International audienceHelicopter configuration management is a cornerstone for aircraft industries and operators. The information on helicopter configuration is essential for safety, maintenance and availability reasons. Eurocopter is developing a project for integrating RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) tags on helicopter parts for maintenance. These technologies will support configuration management and provide maintenance information. As these RFID tags will be embedded, they have to be adapted to aircraft environment and harsh conditions. This improvement will increase RFID tag costs. In this paper, we identify and quantify impacts on maintenance processes. Our study focuses on a major maintenance cost indicator: the DMC (Direct Maintenance Cost). We will show that RFID technologies can greatly influence the DMC