Development of MILP model for integrated aircraft maintenance scheduling and multi-period parking layout planning problems

Abstract

In this paper, two closely related problems commonly observed in aircraft hangar maintenance companies are studied: the aircraft hangar maintenance scheduling problem and the parking stand planning problem. Recently, in order to reduce operating costs in airline companies, outsourcing aircraft heavy maintenance activities to a third-party maintenance company has been gaining greater traction. In a real operation environment, aircraft with different arrival times and specific maintenance requirements from airline companies are received by an aircraft maintenance company. Hence, a maintenance schedule and a series of aircraft parking plans have to be carefully arranged to minimize the total delay over a multi-period planning horizon. However, conventional manual planning usually causes maintenance delays due to inadequate parking planning that induces blockages between arriving, departing and parked aircraft in the process of aircraft roll in and roll out operations. To deal with the inefficiency of manual planning, a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model that integrates maintenance scheduling and parking layout planning is proposed. To our knowledge, this is the first work to deal with the aircraft maintenance scheduling problem incorporating non-overlapping constraints between aircraft in the hangar, and is the main contribution of this research.