An optimization model for aircraft maintenance scheduling and re-assignment

Abstract

The aircraft maintenance scheduling is one among the major decisions an airline has to make during its operation. Though maintenance scheduling comes as an end stage in an airline operation, it has potential for cost savings. Maintenance scheduling is an easily understood but difficult to solve problem. Given a flight schedule with aircraft assigned to it, the aircraft maintenance-scheduling problem is to determine which aircraft should fly which segment and when and where each aircraft should undergo different levels of maintenance check required by the Federal Aviation Administration. The objective is to minimize the maintenance cost and any costs incurred during the re-assignment of aircraft to the flight segments. This paper provides a complete formulation for maintenance scheduling and a heuristic approach to solve the problem. The heuristic procedure provides good solutions in reasonable computation time. This model can be used by mid-sized airline corporations to optimize their maintenance cost. © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.