Technician Allocation to Base Maintenance of Aircraft Fleet: a computer application

Abstract

This paper presents a practical application development for planning base maintenance of a mix of aircraft fleets. The application proposed contributes to the seize of decisions for maintenance, supporting lines for the action of hangar management. The formulation for the planning is into the framework of a nonlinear integer mathematical programming problem written as a minimization one. The objective function is a measure of costs incurred with the allocation of technicians to the maintenance of aircraft, the daily operation cost due to facilities and the opportunity cost due to aircraft downtime. Constraints are due to the available workforce and space safety conditions. The proposed application is a reformulation of the above formulation, using a transformation of the integer variables to Boolean ones to benefit from well-established commercial solvers. A case study addresses a comparison between the formulation and the reformulation of the problem, presenting a discussion about the limitation of using relaxation to continuous variables. Also addressed are other features emanating from the obtained data.