A Robust Optimization Scheduling for Carrier Aircraft Support Operation Based on Critical Chain Method

Abstract

The maintenance and service support of carrier aircraft (MSSCA) is a complex process involving many types of resources and activities that require optimisation which can be considered as a multi-resource constrained multi-project scheduling problem (MRCMPSP). It is of great significance to optimize the makespan and obtain a proactive robust schedule to be adaptive to the changes in the dynamic flight deck environment. This paper develops a critical chain method (CCM) for carrier aircraft support robust scheduling in a time-critical and resource-constrained operation environment. The CCM consists of developing a desirable deterministic schedule under multi resource constraints and time-critical issues, and adding a project buffer (PB) to the end of the schedule is used to get a robust proactive scheduling and deal with uncertainty. The triangular fuzzy number (TFN) is applied to describe the durations of each activities and calculate the PB size and obtain an appropriate proportionality between the activity duration and the buffer size. In the numerical research, different size simulations are designed to calculated the robust optimization scheduling. The computational results show that the CMM for carrier aircraft support robust scheduling can make a better decision in the robust proactive optimization scheduling about the resource allocation.