A model enhancement heuristic for building robust aircraft maintenance personnel rosters with stochastic constraints

This paper presents a heuristic approach to optimize staffing and scheduling at an aircraft maintenance company. The goal is to build robust aircraft maintenance personnel rosters that can achieve a certain service level while minimizing the total labour costs. Robust personnel rosters are rosters that can handle delays associated with stochastic flight arrival times. To deal with this stochasticity, a model enhancement algorithm is proposed that iteratively adjusts a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model to a stochastic environment based on simulation results. We illustrate the performance of the algorithm with a computational experiment based on real life data of a large aircraft maintenance company located at Brussels Airport in Belgium. The obtained results are compared to deterministic optimization and straightforward optimization. Experiments demonstrate that our model can ensure a certain desired service level with an acceptable increase in labour costs when stochasticity is introduced in the aircraft arrival times.publisher: Elsevier articletitle: A model enhancement heuristic for building robust aircraft maintenance personnel rosters with stochastic constraints journaltitle: European Journal of Operational Research articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2015.05.008 content_type: article copyright: Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. and Association of European Operational Research Societies (EURO) within the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS). All rights reserved.status: publishe