Tool management optimisation through traceability and tool wear prediction in the aviation industry

The aviation industry is characterised by high manufacturing requirements of products with difficult-to-machine materials to ensure quality and safety. Standardised and secured processes and transparency in resource and material flows within production are important requirements for meeting these safety and quality standards while staying competitive on the market. Those requirements also apply to a companies’ tool management and are to be met with an optimised tool change strategy considering economic aspects at the same time. The article presents a use case of a company belonging to the aviation industry striving to achieve goals concerning costs, quality, and time in their tool management. To realise potential improvements a retrofitting traceability solution is illustrated enabling data-based maintenance strategies in the use case. The traceability solution aims to provide transparency about tool inventory, the location of tools on the shop floor and functions as data acquisition system to realise the individual tracking of used tools. Using the individual tracking data of tools and matching them with relevant machining data enables the application of data-based maintenance strategies pointing out possibilities to indicate the tools’ wear state. This approach offers benefits such as reducing the scrap rate or machining down times with a direct impact on quality, costs, or lead times of customer orders.