A Two-step Heuristic to Build Flight and Maintenance Planning in a Rolling-horizon

Abstract

Each aircraft of an airline company has to undergo maintenance checks at the end of a certain amount of flight hours to ensure the security conditions. Given a flight schedule for a specific aircraft fleet, our objective is to search the efficiency of the proposed method on rolling horizon and to compare different types of maintenance policies. The proposed method maximizes the aircraft utilization before the maintenance interventions and smooths the fight load of the aircrafts so that the maintenance checks are regular for all the fleet. The flight planning of ten weeks is prepeared on a rolling horizon. The sliding time window is one week. We propose a two-step approach to solve this optimization problem. The first sub-problem concerns only the critical aircrafts which must undergo a maintenance check in the planning week. The second sub-problem concerns non-critical aircraft load smoothing. We show that, for different weekly flight loads, different maintenance policies can be more advantageous while some other policies led company disabilities to insure the flights.