The Aircraft Maintenance Base Location Problem

Ram Gopalan

European Journal of Operational Research, 2014, vol. 236, issue 2, 634-642

Abstract: Aviation authorities such as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) provide stringent guidelines for aircraft maintenance, with violations leading to significant penalties for airlines. Moreover, poorly maintained aircraft can lead to mass cancellation of flights, causing tremendous inconvenience to passengers and resulting in a significant erosion in brand image for the airline in question. Aircraft maintenance operations of a complex and extended nature can only be performed at designated maintenance bases. Aircraft maintenance planning literature has focused on developing good tail-number routing plans, while assuming that the locations of the maintenance bases themselves are fixed. This paper considers an inverse optimization problem, viz., locating a minimal number of maintenance bases on an Euler tour, while ensuring that all required aircraft maintenance activities can be performed with a stipulated periodicity. The Aircraft Maintenance Base Location Problem (AMBLP) is shown to be NP-complete and a new lower bound is developed for the problem. The performance of four simple “quick and dirty” heuristics for obtaining feasible solutions to AMBLP is analyzed.

Keywords: Air transportation; Aircraft maintenance; Facility location; Approximation algorithms; Computational complexity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221714000095
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:ejores:v:236:y:2014:i:2:p:634-642

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2014.01.007

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().