This paper presents a method for constructing the workforce schedules of an aircraft maintenance company. The method integrates both the staffing and the scheduling decision. We formulate the optimization problem using a mixed integer linear programming approach and solve it heuristically using a branch-and-bound enumeration framework. Each node of the tree represents a combination of teams and...

The main goal of this research is to investigate minimum fuel descent trajectories for various types of aircraft and consider appropriate arrival sequencing based on the acquired results. First, the validity of a point mass model to find optimized descent trajectories in order to obtain minimal fuel consumption is confirmed. Through single aircraft numerical simulations, the principle “higher f...

This paper presents our application of a visualization tool and optimization model based on mixed-integer linear programming to solve a workforce staffing and scheduling problem at Sabena Technics, a major aircraft maintenance company in Belgium. We used the software to generate many alternative, cost-efficient schedules and to analyze multiple scenarios. In several management meetings, stakeho...

In aircraft components maintenance shops, components are distributed amongst repair groups and their respective technicians based on the type of repair, on the technicians skills and workload, and on the customer required dates. This distribution planning is typically done in an empirical manner based on the group leader’s past experience. Such a procedure does not provide any performance guara...

Passengers’ experience is becoming a key metric to evaluate the air transportation system’s performance. Efficient and robust tools to handle airport operations are needed along with a better understanding of passengers’ interests and concerns. Among various airport operations, this paper studies airport gate scheduling for improved passengers’ experience. Three objectives accounting for passen...

The problem of scheduling aircraft landings on one or more runways is an interesting problem that is similar to a machine job scheduling problem with sequence-dependent processing times and with earliness and tardiness penalties. The aim is to optimally land a set of planes on one or several runways in such a way that separation criteria between all pairs of planes (not just successive ones) ar...

Disruption management is one of the main concerns of any airline company, as it can influence its annual revenue by upwards of 3%. Most of medium to large airlines have specialized teams which focus on recovering disrupted schedules with very little automation. This paper presents a new automated approach to solve both the Aircraft Assignment Problem (AAP) and the Aircraft Recovering Problem (A...

This paper proposes novel Fuel Cell Auxiliary Power Unit (FCAPU) for J150+ aircraft application. The primary version of APU in J150+ aircraft is a gas turbine Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) which is based on gas turbine jet engine but in the suggested FCAPU, the generated electrical power is achieved from chemical energy with higher efficiency. The Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) technology is used to...