Service accessibility strategy for aircraft maintenance routing with interorganizational collaborations on outsourcing maintenance

Abstract

Airline companies are increasingly outsourcing their fleets’ heavy maintenance to independent maintenance service providers. This paper investigates the aircraft maintenance routing problem (AMRP) under the Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) outsourcing mode. Considering interorganizational maintenance implementation, an airline company’s accessibility to maintenance service is affected by the varying maintenance capabilities of the maintenance service provider, which depends on heterogenous maintenance resource availability (e.g., the accommodation capacity of maintenance hangars and the availability of maintenance technicians and aviation spare parts). To enhance the airline’s service accessibility to maintenance service, we propose an efficient maintenance planning strategy with a collaborative mechanism based on service information sharing and service capability evaluation from the airline’s perspective. Afterward, a time-complexity reduction approach is presented to enhance the discrete-time-stamp-indexed mathematical model formulation. The efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach were evaluated through various problem scenarios, based on the operational data from a regional airline. Managerial implications regarding maintenance strategy and the accuracy of maintenance capability evaluation are also discussed.