Abstract:
Aircraft maintenance is one of the critical aspect that ensures safe and optimized operations of an airline. In order to get maintenance at regular intervals as per the FAA regulations, an aircraft is required to be routed towards a maintenance station. Aircraft maintenance routing is one of the major factor that influences the decisions throughout the airline operations. Considerable efforts has been made in recent past focusing on the aircraft routing and its optimization, whenever an aircraft is due for maintenance.
Given a balance and periodic flight schedule air craft maintenance routing is about finding the most suitable route for an aircraft in order to achieve the minimum cost for that route. A good rotation plan of an aircraft must be cost-effective and should allow each aircraft in a fleet to undergo maintenance checks.
In this research, the main aim remained to provide complete formulation that can find a balanced route for an aircraft that belongs to a particular fleet of an airline. Given a set of flight legs for a specific aircraft type with the specified maintenance locations and known remaining flying hours a search based routing model is proposed which optimizes the aircraft maintenance routes. The objective of this research is to minimize the maintenance cost, and multiple optimization techniques has been evaluated in order to obtain the best objective results.
