Flight and Maintenance Planning of Military Aircraft for Maximum Fleet Availability

Abstract

Every aircraft, military or civilian, must be grounded for maintenance after it has completed a certain number of flight hours since its last maintenance check. Flight and maintenance planning (FMP) of military aircraft addresses the problem of deciding which available aircraft to fly and for how long, and which grounded aircraft to perform maintenance operations on, in a group of aircraft that comprise a combat unit. The objective is to achieve maximum availability of the unit over the planning horizon. In this paper, we develop an optimization model for the FMP problem, and we illustrate its application and solution on a real life instance drawn from the Hellenic Air Force. We also propose two heuristic techniques for solving large-scale instances of the problem. We conclude with a discussion of the model based on the analysis of the obtained results.