Designing a collaborative maintenance planning mechanism between airline and maintenance company using a bilevel model – Considering flexible maintenance schedule and service charges

Abstract

Periodic aircraft Maintenance Repair and Overhaul (MRO) activities are compulsory. To capture the features of MRO operations between airline and maintenance company under MRO outsourcing mode, we consider a collaborative aircraft maintenance planning problem, in which the airline outsources its self-operated maintenance checks to an independent maintenance company. Under such context, MRO planning conflicts between two collaborates exists especially during maintenance peak period, as airline aims to maximize flight operations revenues by receiving timely MRO service. On the other hand, maintenance company strives to accomplish heterogenous demands without causing tardiness and involving excessive MRO resources cost. Therefore, finding an effective mechanism to eliminate the conflicts between maintenance demands (from airline company) and maintenance service supply capability (from maintenance company) is indispensable for collaboration. A bi-level optimization model is formulated to describe the conflicting objectives and maintenance planning features of two independent stakeholders. To facilitates a synchronization of demand and supply and reconcile MRO conflicts, flexible maintenance schedules and service charges decisions from two independent collaborators is involved in the model, enabling a maintenance planning negotiation for finding mutual beneficial maintenance plan. An iterative algorithm deploying bounding updating strategy is developed, which generates a series of convergent-oriented bounding constraints along the iterative negotiation and guides the adjustment of maintenance demand and supply towards equilibrium. Based on the computational results in solving various maintenance planning scenarios, the impacts of different features (e.g. resource availability, resource demands level, and penalty cost of service tardiness) on airline and service company’s planning performance are analysed, revealing that maintenance service company’s own interest can be assured and maintained though it is a follower in the collaboration framework Afterwards, the managerial insights for facilitating the maintenance collaboration are further discussed.