Combinatorial Benders decomposition for the operational aircraft maintenance routing problem

Abstract

The operational aircraft maintenance routing problem (OAMRP) assigns the aircraft in a fleet to scheduled flights while satisfying maintenance requirements. Aviation rules enforce the aircraft to undergo maintenance before the maximum accumulated flight hour is exceeded. Due to the dynamic environment of the airline industry, aircraft routes considering operational requirements become definite a few days before their operation. Thus, disruption-prone plans entail the development of fast solution algorithms. We propose a combinatorial Benders decomposition algorithm to solve this problem. The proposed algorithm is enhanced with valid inequalities to improve convergence. In addition, we implement a branch-and-Benders-cut algorithm. A computational study is conducted to quantify the effectiveness of the derived inequalities. We also provide an extensive comparison to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other approaches in terms of solution quality and computation time.