Algorithms for Aircraft Flight and Maintenance Scheduling in an Army Aviation Unit

Abstract

This paper focuses on an aircraft flight and maintenance scheduling problem with the objective of maximizing the weighted sum of completed missions. We consider two types of maintenance activities: short-term maintenance activity to be performed when the cumulative flight time for an aircraft reaches a predetermined range; and long-term maintenance activity to be performed after a predetermined number of short-term maintenance activities. In the problem, both flight and maintenance schedules for each aircraft are to be determined. We present a mathematical formulation for the problem and develop heuristic algorithms. Performance of the proposed algorithms is evaluated with a series of tests on a number of problem instances, and results are reported