EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Aircraft line maintenance scheduling and optimisation

Syed Shaukat, Mathias Katscher, Cheng-Lung Wu, Felipe Delgado and Homero Larrain

Journal of Air Transport Management, 2020, vol. 89, issue C

Abstract: With the advent of new technologies and more modern aircraft, many of the maintenance jobs traditionally scheduled for periodic block checks can now be performed in the ‘‘line maintenance†environment, i.e., during layovers between scheduled flights of an aircraft. This flexibility can be exploited to reduce maintenance costs and improve fleet utilisation of an airline. In this paper we introduce and study the Line Maintenance Scheduling Problem (LMSP). The LMSP assigns jobs to available maintenance opportunities, defined by aircraft routes, and sets the starting time for each job. Its objective is to minimise the deviation from this schedule with respect to given due dates for each task, without exceeding resource capacity at the airports at any moment. We formulate the LMSP as a mixed integer programming problem, and describe and compare two solution approaches for this problem: an integrated exact solution algorithm, which solves job assignment and timetabling simultaneously, and a sequential, heuristic approach. We tested our algorithms on a set of instances inspired on data provided by an industry partner. Our experiments show the applicability of both approaches on realistic settings: the exact approach was able to find the optimal solution for all instances, in less than 10 min on average. Our analysis also shows with an example that line maintenance can be more efficient when capacity is spatially spread, even if the total capacity is reduced.

Keywords: Aircraft maintenance; Line maintenance; Mixed integer programming; Heuristics; Scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096969972030497X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jaitra:v:89:y:2020:i:c:s096969972030497x

DOI: 10.1016/j.jairtraman.2020.101914

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Air Transport Management is currently edited by Anne Graham

More articles in Journal of Air Transport Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:eee:jaitra:v:89:y:2020:i:c:s096969972030497x