An approach to operational aircraft maintenance planning

This paper describes a short-term planning methodology of the line maintenance activities of an airline operator, at the airports, during turn-around time (TAT). The proposed methodology supports decision making for deferring maintenance actions that affect the dispatching of the aircrafts, aiming at high fleet operability and low maintenance cost. Based on health assessment and additional information regarding operational and economical constraints at the operator's fleet level, a multi-criteria mechanism evaluates a set of generated maintenance plan alternatives. An alternative is defined as the possible allocation of all deferred maintenance tasks to a set of suitable airport resources. The selected decision making criteria are cost, remaining useful life (RUL), operational risk and flight delay. A series of experiments is conducted in order to validate and test the approach. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.