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 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 set of aircraft that comprise a combat unit. The objective is to achieve maximum availability of the unit over the planning horizon. In this work, we develop a biobjective optimization model of the flight and maintenance planning problem, and we illustrate its application and solution on a real life instance drawn from the Hellenic Air Force. We formulate the flight and maintenance planning problem as a mixed integer linear program, with two objectives: total number of available aircraft and total residual flight time. The residual flight time of an available aircraft is defined as the total remaining time that this aircraft can fly, until it has to be grounded for maintenance check. For the solution of the problem we apply the weighted sums approach and lexicographic optimization. By comparing and analyzing the solutions obtained, we get insight into the behavior of the model. We conclude with a discussion based on these results and suggestions on how the model can be extended in the future.

Maintenance scheduling of a fleet of fighter aircraft through multi-objective simulation-optimization

“…The overall value intervals of the non-dominated schedules are now calculated with the sets of feasible weights according to equations (10) and (11). The intervals are depicted in Figures 7(a) and 7 Because there does not exist a unique preferred schedule on the basis of the dominance relations or the decision rules, the DM may wish to consider also the performance indicators listed in Section 3.1.…”

“…Kozanidis and Kozanidis, Liberopoulos, et al present mixed integer linear programming formulations in which the flight missions and maintenance activities of aircraft are scheduled over a planning horizon consisting of several periods. 10,11 The objectives are to maximize aircraft availability and to maintain a steady maintenance workload by keeping the elapsed flight hours of the aircraft at a suitable level. In other work, Kozanidis, Gavranis, and Liberopoulos develop heuristic procedures for solving large instances of the above formulations, and Kozanidis, Gavranis, and Kostarelou consider a non-linear mixed integer formulation.…”

Optimisation of Flight and Maintenance Planning for Defence Aviation with Modified Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm

“…Equation (10) sets the requirement for sustainability (the remaining flight time of aircraft before they need to be serviced or inspected) to be greater than a minimum at any given time. Equations (11) and (12) require that flight hours and flight cycles of any aircraft do not exceed a particular value between two consecutive scheduled calendar maintenance dates. These have been set, for academic interest as 147 and 37 respectively.…”

Multi‐agent system for the reactive fleet maintenance support planning of a fleet of mobile cyber–physical systems

“…Description of the constraints Constraint (10) sets the Boolean variable w i to zero if the CPS i is not undergoing CBM maintenance. Constraint (11) ensures that the CPSs undergoing CBM does not affect the total requested availability ϵ. Constraint (12) ensures that there is at least a minimum number of mission-ready CPSs ϵ available, and it includes both the CPSs that do not need maintenance actions (group 1) and the CPSs in CBM group (group 2). In constraint (13), a CPS must be only in one group at a time, either no maintenance action, CBM or corrective maintenance group.…”