Military aircraft flight and maintenance scheduling with many additional considerations

Abstract

We present a mixed-integer program for the simultaneous optimization of maintenance scheduling and tail assignments for military aircraft, which is often called a Flight and Maintenance Scheduling Problem. Our model contains many real-world considerations often not in the literature such as multiple types of maintenance and flights, maintenance station constraints, aircraft configuration considerations, training and deployment assignments, and a many-criterion objective function that accounts for many nice-tohave details that make a schedule better according to operational schedulers. Our model also contains a more robust approach to phase flow regulation—i.e., planning for major hours-based maintenance—that allows aircraft to surpass each other in the phase queue and includes a tolerance for meeting ideal hours-until-phase targets. While many of these attributes are raised in previous works, no other model has integrated and balanced all these practical concerns. Sample results are also included along with suggestions for future research.