A decision support approach to aircraft maintenance planning optimization

The aviation industry has increased at 5% in worldwide, while at 30% in Turkey in the last 5 years. This rapid increase has also brought the competitions and opportunities. An effective competition at the civil aviation sector could be possible by an effective fleet management. One of two important functions of the fleet management is to define the aircraft routes and plan the aircraft maintenance. Considering defining the aircraft routes and the aircraft maintenance costs which form 18-23% of the direct operation costs, solving these two problems with integrated methods, it is obvious that the opportunities gained will affect the competition power of the airlines positively. Although there are some studies which investigate these two problems separately, there are also few studies which deal with both these problems. In this study, defining the aircraft routes with maintenance requirements, either the effective usage of aircrafts and minimizing the maintenance costs has been aimed. At the direction of these goals, an approaching combined multi-objective mixed integer linear model is proposed which minimize the legal available flight durations of the aircrafts before maintenance. This approach has balanced the flight numbers and/or flight durations at the direction of decision maker, thus it has provided the aircraft usage ratio and maintenance costs as possible as equal. Compensating the daily flight number and durations of aircrafts, it has eliminated the difficulties which one could encounter at the crew scheduling problems. The proposed approach is decision support system which provides priority updates and interactive re-defines towards to the goal for the decision maker. During the proofing of the availability of the approach, the problems created by the real data of two airlines, have been solved by the software of CPLEX/GAMS mixed integer linear program and interpreted. Keywords : Goal Programming, Aircraft Maintenance Planning, Aircraft Routing, Civil Aviation Management, Mixed-Integer Programming, Decision Support System.