| dc.description.abstract | A good maintenance plan can help an airline to efficiently perform aircraft maintenance so as to ensure its aviation safety and flight punctuality. However, in the past the airline maintenance scheduling was mostly performed by staff based on experience, which is not only time-consuming but also ineffective in meeting the maintenance requirements, resulting in waste of manpower. There was very little literature dealing with such problems in the past. Although a preliminary research was carried on the problem recently, it did not consider practical strategies, limiting its effect in practice. On the other hand, flexible management strategies from overseas, for example, flexible working hours and flexible manpower, have been recently popular and applied by some carriers in Taiwan. In this research, we use mathematical programming techniques and computer algorithms, incorporating feasible flexible management strategies, to develop suitable models and solution methods, in order to help airlines efficiently and effectively plan their maintenance schedules and manpower supplies.
We first developed a basic model. Then incorporating different flexible strategies such flexible shifts, flexible crew members and flexible working length, we developed several strategic models based on the basic model. These models are formulated as mixed integer programs. Since their problem sizes are huge and cannot be optimally solved in a reasonably short time, we developed a new solution algorithm to solve the problems. We used C computer language to code all necessary programs and apply the mathematical programming solver, CPLEX, as well to develop the solution algorithm. Finally, to evaluate the models and solution algorithm, we performed a case study using the real operating data from a major Taiwan airline. | en_US |