Aviation maintenance technician scheduling with personnel satisfaction based on interactive multi‐swarm bacterial foraging optimization

Abstract

This study focuses on the challenges of aviation maintenance technician (AMT) scheduling and constructs a model based on personnel satisfaction and the parallel execution of aircraft maintenance tasks. To obtain the scheduling scheme from the constructed NP-hard model, an interactive multiswarm bacterial foraging optimization (IMSBFO) algorithm is proposed using multi-swarm coevolution, structural recombination, and three information interactive mechanisms among individuals. Moreover, considering the distributed feature of the AMT scheduling problem, a specific mechanism is designed to convert continuous solution to a binary AMT scheduling scheme. Finally, a series of comparative experiments highlight the efficiency and superiority of our proposed IMSBFO algorithm, and the optimal scheduling scheme owns the delicate balance between the work and rest time.