Journal
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
Volume 299, Issue 3, Pages 814-833Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2021.09.019
Keywords
Scheduling; Approximate dynamic programming; Lookahead policy; Stochastic optimization
Funding
- Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union [681858]
- H2020 Societal Challenges Programme [681858] Funding Source: H2020 Societal Challenges Programme
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This paper proposes a lookahead approximate dynamic programming methodology to address aircraft maintenance check scheduling, aiming to minimize wasted utilization intervals between maintenance checks while reducing the need for additional maintenance slots. Through validation, the methodology is shown to potentially decrease the number of checks and increase aircraft availability while also respecting airworthiness regulations.
This paper proposes a lookahead approximate dynamic programming methodology for aircraft maintenance check scheduling, considering the uncertainty of aircraft daily utilization and maintenance check elapsed time. It adopts a dynamic programming framework, using a hybrid lookahead scheduling policy. The hybrid lookahead scheduling policy makes the one-step optimal decision for heavy aircraft maintenance based on deterministic forecasts and then determines the light maintenance according to stochastic forecasts. The objective is to minimize the total wasted utilization interval between maintenance checks while reducing the need for additional maintenance slots. By achieving this goal, one is also reducing the number of maintenance checks and increasing aircraft availability while respecting airworthiness regulations. We validate the proposed methodology using the fleet maintenance data from a major European airline. The descriptive statistics of several test runs show that, when compared with the current practice, the proposed methodology potentially reduces the number of A-checks by 1.9%, the number of C-checks by 9.8%, and the number of additional slots by 78.3% over four years.
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