Aircraft routing with generalized maintenance constraints

Abstract

The literature on aircraft maintenance routing generally ignores the full range of maintenance requirements by only considering the most frequent maintenance type. The range of maintenance types and variety of individual aircraft's ages and utilization rates means the maintenance demand for each aircraft differs from one period to another, thus complicating aircraft routing decisions. This study proposes a new formulation of the aircraft maintenance routing problem in which maintenance requirements are built as generalized capacity constraints, ensuring sufficient maintenance opportunities are available within the planned routes to satisfy the maintenance demands of individual aircraft. Our new approach suggests minimizing maintenance misalignment using an interactive mechanism between aircraft routing and maintenance planning decisions. The computational results using real datasets reveal continuous reduction and convergence in maintenance misalignment through the proposed interactive mechanism. The lack of an effective interaction between the abovementioned decisions significantly increases the maintenance misalignment costs.