Concurrent Aircraft Routing and Maintenance Scheduling

The aircraft routing is the process of assigning each individual aircraft within each fleet to flight legs. The Federal Aviation Rules require the maintenance of all the aircrafts after specified hours of period as mandatory. The minimum total maintenance cost is provided as a result of the lost flight time which is brought to minimum. The common policies in this business sector follow the practices the maintenance of an aircraft once in 3-4 days periodically. This policy minimizes the risk of grounding of aircraft in the cost of the lost flight hours. In this study, we propose a concurrent, mathematical modeling approach for daily flight route and maintenance scheduling based on recorded flight hours. The model has been solved using CPLEX/GAMS MILP Software. The proposed approach was applied to the daily flight route-maintenance schedule problems of the domestic flights of two companies.