Planning of aircraft fleet maintenance teams

Abstract

This paper addresses a support information system for the planning of aircraft maintenance teams, assisting maintenance managers in delivering aircraft on time. The developed planning of aircraft maintenance teams is a computer application based on a mathematical programming problem written as a minimization one. The initial decision variables are positive integer variables specifying the allocation of available technicians by skills to maintenance teams. The objective function is a nonlinear function balancing the time spent and costs incurred with aircraft fleet maintenance. The data involves the technicians’ skills, the hours of work to perform maintenance tasks, the costs related to facilities, and the aircraft downtime cost. The realism of this planning entails random possibilities associated with maintenance workload data, and inference by a procedure of Monte Carlo simulation provides a proper set of workloads instead of going through all the possibilities. The based formalization is a nonlinear integer programming problem, converted into an equivalent pure linear integer programming problem, using a transformation from initial positive integer variables to Boolean ones. A case study addresses the use of this support information system for planning a team for aircraft maintenance of three lines under the uncertainty of workloads, and a discussion of results shows the serviceableness of the proposed support information system.