An On-Event Based Model for Resource Constrained Scheduling of Aircraft Heavy Maintenance Tasks

Abstract

Given the high operating costs of the airline industry, it is advantageous to minimize the time that an aircraft spends in the maintenance bay, while also maintaining high resource utilization; thus, scheduling maintenance tasks with the goal of minimizing the makespan is desired. This paper develops a new on-event-based MILP formulation for the aircraft maintenance application of the resource constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). Several numerical experiments are conducted to compare the performance of the new model against existing ones. Analysis of the results shows the conditions under which the new formulation outperforms existing models. This new formulation is appropriate for large-scale problems with a relatively high number of resources available and relatively low resource demand.