Heuristic Approaches for Flight and Maintenance Planning of Large Fleets

The Flight and Maintenance Planning of an aircraft fleet is concerned with finding an optimum schedule for each individual aircraft to meet both operations and safety requirements. The objectives are to minimise deviation from flight requirements and to minimise cost of transfer between deployment and maintenance bases. In the case of a large aircraft fleet that demands complex maintenance routines and deployment requirements, determination of the optimum operation and maintenance schedule represents a significant challenge. This study aims to identify and develop computationally efficient methods of solving this problem for large fleet sizes. An integer programming formulation is proposed and used as a benchmark to compare the performance and computational efficiency of several heuristic and meta-heuristic methods including: Enhanced Aircraft Flowchart Diagram; neighbourhood search; variable neighbourhood search; tabu search and; simulated annealing algorithms. ii Certificate of Authenticity I, Leonard Winata, declare that: Except where due acknowledgement has been made, the work is that of myself alone; The work has not been submitted previously, in whole or in part, to qualify for any other academic award; The content of the thesis is the result of work which has been carried out since the official commencement date of the approved research program; Any editorial work, paid or unpaid, carried out by a third party has been acknowledged; and Ethics procedures and guidelines have been followed