Title: A sustainable method for scheduling maintenance services of an airline with the aims of minimising awaiting times and maximising flights performance

Authors: Aidin Delgoshaei; Fateme Naserbakht

Addresses: Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Putra Malaysia, Serdang, 43400, Malaysia ' Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Putra Malaysia, Serdang, 43400, Malaysia

Abstract: In this research, an efficient multi-objective hybrid method is proposed for scheduling maintenance services of an airline in order to reduce maintenance and repair costs and the work cycle of the aircraft simultaneously. The method is developed based on real conditions in repair shops of international airlines. Schedule aircraft according to their preventive plans and flight tables in order to reduce the awaiting times in the main repair shops of the airline. The method can also rent aircraft from other airlines when necessary and allows alien airplanes to use repair shop services to utilise performance of the repair shop. Several case studies using real number of aircraft in the airlines are solved to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results showed the proposed method can schedule maintenance services of large scale airplanes and decrease the multi-objective functions up to 48% in the solved case studies.

Keywords: aviation; maintenance planning; flight scheduling; multi-objective decision making; awaiting time.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSA.2019.101747

International Journal of Sustainable Aviation, 2019 Vol.5 No.2, pp.119 - 157

Received: 13 Dec 2018
Accepted: 24 May 2019
Published online: 24 Aug 2019 *

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