China Eastern Rolls Out Maintenance Data Center for Interconnected, Integrated Maintenance Data Management

Recently, the first phase of the Maintenance Data Center (MDC), independently developed by China Eastern Digital Technology and China Eastern Airlines Technology, was officially launched. Built on the massive maintenance data accumulated over years of China Eastern’s aircraft maintenance operations, the MDC aligns with the digital-intelligent transformation data management blueprint of China Eastern Airlines Technology. It constructs a dedicated data base for aircraft maintenance to realize interconnected sharing and integrated management of maintenance data.

Aircraft maintenance covers the full aircraft and engine lifecycle including line maintenance, fleet operation, aviation materials, component removal and replacement, and scheduled inspections. With long business chains and multiple systems, data has long been scattered across different business systems, resulting in pain points such as data silos, inconsistent statistical standards and high acquisition costs. These issues constrain aircraft reliability analysis, maintenance cost control and operation management efficiency. To tackle these challenges, the MDC project leverages China Eastern Airlines’ enterprise-level data warehouse platform to build a dedicated big data analysis platform for aircraft maintenance that integrates data collection, storage, governance, circulation, analysis and application.

The MDC project team has systematically advanced the construction of the aircraft maintenance data asset system:

• Completed data inventory of core systems including the SAP Maintenance Management System, SAP Phase III Maintenance System and Technical Document Management System (TDMS), driving visualized asset management from scattered to centralized and from ambiguous to clear;
• Built a maintenance data asset catalog, with cataloging, layering and indexing organized by business domain, to create a queryable and reusable data map;
• Implemented metadata management capabilities to uniformly register data tables, fields, statistical calibers and source systems;
• Rolled out classified and graded data management with supporting security measures such as access control and operation traceability, striking a balance between data value release and security control.

The launched first phase of MDC focuses on two core business scenarios: aircraft reliability and maintenance finance. It collects, cleans and integrates raw maintenance data from multiple systems, and designs a layered data warehouse architecture around business themes such as aircraft-engine operation, abnormal events, component removal and replacement, work records, scheduled maintenance, structural repair and aviation material consumption. Over 160 core underlying data sets have been collected and loaded into the data warehouse.

The platform provides visualization query tools for maintenance personnel and supports self-service exploratory analysis. Business teams can conduct reliability analysis, judgment and financial accounting analysis based on theme-wide data tables, realizing capabilities such as fleet operation status monitoring, abnormal event statistics and maintenance cost analysis, and turning maintenance data into actionable insights.

Going forward, the China Eastern Maintenance Data Center will continue to incorporate core data from more business domains including aircraft and engine management, production decision-making and safety control. It will deepen aircraft-engine data governance, actively explore innovative “data + AI” applications, empower smart maintenance scenarios such as lean fleet management, troubleshooting assistance and predictive maintenance, unlock the value of data assets, and support the transformation of maintenance management from experience-driven to data-intelligence-driven.