The drive to reduce aircraft operation and support (O&S) costs, increase platform availability, and enhance their performance and safety has motivated researchers, technology developers, aircraft manufacturers, and fleet operators to explore effective alternative concepts, methodologies, and technologies to the traditional schedule-based maintenance philosophy.

Condition-based maintenance (CBM) is an approach based on the factual “need” for corrective or consequence avoiding action; therefore, maintenance actions are only performed when the “need” arises. This alternative combines real-time asset data with sophisticated materials and structural models to give it the predictive power to add capacity, reliability, and profitability. In addition to the promise of enhancing the effectiveness of maintenance programs by preventing unplanned downtime, making better use of maintenance resources, and maximizing the operational life of the asset, CBM has shown significant saving potential in the military sector.

We invite authors to submit original research and review articles that will stimulate the continuing efforts in the development and implementation of advanced maintenance and management concepts. We are particularly interested in articles presenting and demonstrating new modalities for advanced condition-based maintenance. We also seek contributions on actual maintenance benefits and maintenance credits in addition to maintenance studies of CBM implementation including choice of technologies and regulatory and certification challenges to overcome. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Recent developments in CBM technologies, policies, strategies, and so on
• Advances in CBM system and system implementation
• Latest technologies and approaches for systems evaluation and measuring outcomes
• CBM functional component, modeling, sensor technology, data mining, and fusion systems architecture and implementation
• Lessons learnt, implementation challenges, maintenance benefits, and maintenance credits

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijae/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable: