Scheduling algorithms for an aircraft maintenance system

Abstract

Preventive maintenance is a very important aspect of operation of the army aviation unit, since it usually accounts for a substantial part of the overall operational costs and imposes constraints on flights planning. In this study, we consider a maintenance scheduling problem with the objective of maximizing total utilization of aircrafts that require two types of maintenance: short-term maintenance, which is needed once every R hours of operation, and long-term maintenance, which is needed once every (y+1) R hours of operation. There are a limited number of maintenance teams, each of which is in charge of only one aircraft if the maintenance work is done as a preventive maintenance. As flight plans should meet daily mission demands, one needs to determine a maintenance schedule for the aircrafts considering flight plans to increase the availability of the aircrafts. In this research, we formulate the maintenance scheduling problem as a mixed integer program and develop heuristic algorithms to find a near optimal solution within a reasonable time. Performance of the suggested algorithms is evaluated with a series of tests on sets of real data, and results are compared with real maintenance plans.