Optimal Resource Management оn Preparing a Group of Similar Aircrafts for Operation

Abstract

The work is devoted to solving the problem of finding the minimum composition of a team of specialists and general ground handling facilities (equipment), as well as distribution in the process of preparing the required group of aircrafts for use within a given time. To justify the minimum composition of the team and the necessary equipment, it is necessary to solve the problem of forming a job schedule for a group of aircrafts, a distinctive feature of which is to take into account a number of restrictions, caused by the interaction of specialists and equipment, as well as the order and incompatibility in time of some jobs. This, in turn, requires consideration of a huge number of options for organizing the work performed on each aircraft, and scheduling options for servicing several aircrafts by one specialist. The problem of substantiating the minimum composition of specialists and equipment is based on the use of combinatorial optimization methods, i.e. the construction of possible solutions, the number of which is reduced by using the branch-and-cut method. The article proposes a mixed integer linear programming model with binary variables to find the optimal solution and a software implementation that does not require large computational resources. It is given and analyzed in detail an example of finding the optimal team of specialists who prepare a group of six aircrafts, each of which performs five types of work. The reasonable solution time to find the schedule for a given team made it possible to consider all possible options for the composition of the team (tens of thousands of options) and justify such an option in which the number of specialists in the team would be minimal, but they would ensure the preparation of the aircraft within a given time. When solving a problem, an exact schedule is found for each considered variant of the team composition. Further development of this approach is based on discrete time models; preliminary studies show the possibility of finding the optimal schedule for preparing a group of 30 aircraft for up to 5 seconds.