Abstract
This paper is about a computer application for planning maintenance of aircraft fleet in what regards allocation of skilled technicians. The formalization for this planning is a mathematical programming problem written as a minimizing one. The decision variables are the allocation of the skilled technicians. The data are the number of available technicians, the working hours needed to accomplish maintenance, the costs due to the daily operation of facilities, and due to the fleet downtime. Although, the formalization is of a non-linear integer-programming problem, a transformation of variables from positive integer ones to Boolean ones is conceivable and allows a reformulation as a pure integer linear programming problem. Also, a relaxation of the integer variables to continuous ones allows for a relaxed formulation as a convex non-linear programming problem. A case study of two fleets illustrates both formulations: solved by the pyomo library calling the GLPK for the pure linear integer programming problem and calling solvers in Scipy library for the relaxed formulation. An inference presented about the results of the case study addresses the issue of using nonlinear programming to emulate the solution of linear integer programming.
Highlights
Airline companies must face the impact of a highly regulated and monitored air transport business settings and regulatory frameworks that impact operation, and, on the industry’s efficiency due to the time required for the aircraft to stay in the hangar, i.e., the hangar downtime [1,2,3]
A survey of the literature agrees in the fact that an adequate team allocation for aircraft fleet maintenance has an impact in reducing the cost of MRO for airlines due to the reduction of the costs incurred in the operation of facilities, and in fleet downtime
The planning maintenance of aircraft fleets in the context of taking the best decisions is an optimization problem formulated as the minimization of the costs incurred, having integer decision variables given by the number of technicians allocated to work for the maintenance of aircraft
Summary
Airline companies must face the impact of a highly regulated and monitored air transport business settings and regulatory frameworks that impact operation, and, on the industry’s efficiency due to the time required for the aircraft to stay in the hangar, i.e., the hangar downtime [1,2,3]. MROs must develop strategies to optimize the use of the workforce, meet maintenance requirements and minimize costs These strategies may involve reviewing the distribution of shifts and the duration of the work week [5], optimizing line maintenance task scheduling [6], better predicting the amount of maintenance unscheduled work [7], scheduling individual tasks to maximize maintenance flexibility [8] or reducing the long term number of maintenance checks by an efficient maintenance planning [9]. GLPK is one of these solvers, an ANSI C freeware linear mixed-integer programming solver [12] Another package used in this paper is SciPy Python library of routines for modeling and solving scientific problems [13,14,15]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
