66 1541-1672/11/$26.00 © 2011 IEEE IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS Published by the IEEE Computer Society INTELLIGENT AGENTS Will Intelligent Assets Take Off? Toward Self-Serving Aircraft Alexandra Brintrup, Duncan McFarlane, Damith Ranasinghe, and Tomás Sánchez López, University of Cambridge Kenneth Owens, Boeing The authors describe a self-serving asset built on an intelligent, self-aware agent platform that maximizes its service life by contacting, selecting, and procuring service providers autonomously. resources from multiple partners; and dynamic resource search problems using multiple performance criteria. Market drivers in the civil aviation indus- try are pressing for a leaner service supply chain. Increased demand, fuel prices, and market competition is causing airlines to de- velop and expand their internal capabilities to reduce costs. This means airline mainte- nance companies, which currently account for nearly 60 percent of market share, are set to increase collaboration with indepen- dent service providers and original equip- ment providers. To further reduce costs and accommodate the increased demand for air travel, suppliers are globally sourced, com- plicating the service optimization problem. The sector also aims to reduce no-fault- found investigations, which cost the industry $300 million per year. 1 Replac- ing periodic checks with condition-based maintenance is now a common aim among many leading service providers. 2 Another factor that demands changes in the current structure is the increase of ly-by-the-hour contracts instead of total ownership, bind- ing manufacturers more tightly to the delivery of intelligent services, where intel- ligence is measured as an output in terms of reduced service costs and increased compo- nent life in service. This search for intelligent services had led us to develop the self-serving asset. The self- serving asset is an evolution of the intelligent product, deined as the coupling of a product and an information-based representation that • possesses a unique identi ication, • can communicate effectively with its environment, • can retain or store data about itself, • deploys a language to display its features and requirements, and • can participate in or make decisions rel- evant to its own destiny. 3 We believe that a product is an asset to its manufacturers until the point of sale. At that point, the product becomes an asset to its new owner. However, if it continues T he aerospace service supply chain deals with the procurement of parts, software, and human resources to update, service, and maintain prod- ucts throughout their service life. This supply chain is immensely complex as a result of ad hoc, unpredictable service requests; the frequent pull of various