| dc.description.abstract | It is essential for airlines to efficiently perform aircraft maintenance in order to ensure aviation safety and punctuality. In tradition, the maintenance scheduling, based on staff’s experiences, was performed using a simple schedule rule. This scheduling method is not only time-consuming but also inefficient. In particular, the resulting manpower supply does not easily meet the minimum requirements, possibly causing imbalance between supply and demand. In this research, we use mathematical programs and computer algorithms to develop suitable models and solution methods, in order to help airlines efficiently and effectively plan their maintenance schedules and manpower supplies, which are then useful for downstream maintenance crew assignments.
Because the problem size of the mixed integer programming model is expected to be huge, we developed a heuristic solution framework to solve the problem. The framework is divided into three stages. In the first two stages, two integer programs are formulated respectively. A mixed integer program is formulated in the third stage. The first model is used to determine the best shift plans. The second model is used to solve the maintenance manpower supply problem for each aircraft type. The third model helps simultaneously solve the maintenance manpower supply problem for mixed aircraft types, based on the fact that maintenance crew members are practically qualified for repairing different aircraft types in a work shift. We solve all stages by using the mathematical programming solver, CPLEX, and other self-developed computer programs. Finally, to evaluate the models and solution algorithms developed in the research, we perform a case study using the operating data from a major Taiwan airline. The results show that the models and the solution methods are useful. | en_US |