A model enhancement heuristic for building robust aircraft maintenance personnel rosters with stochastic constraints

Philippe De Bruecker, Jorne Van den Bergh, Jeroen Beliën and Erik Demeulemeester

European Journal of Operational Research, 2015, vol. 246, issue 2, 661-673

Abstract: This paper presents a heuristic approach to optimize staffing and scheduling at an aircraft maintenance company. The goal is to build robust aircraft maintenance personnel rosters that can achieve a certain service level while minimizing the total labor costs. Robust personnel rosters are rosters that can handle delays associated with stochastic flight arrival times. To deal with this stochasticity, a model enhancement algorithm is proposed that iteratively adjusts a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model to a stochastic environment based on simulation results. We illustrate the performance of the algorithm with a computational experiment based on real life data of a large aircraft maintenance company located at Brussels Airport in Belgium. The obtained results are compared to deterministic optimization and straightforward optimization. Experiments demonstrate that our model can ensure a certain desired service level with an acceptable increase in labor costs when stochasticity is introduced in the aircraft arrival times.

Keywords: Model enhancement; Aircraft maintenance; Stochastic optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:246:y:2015:i:2:p:661-673

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2015.05.008

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