Airline short-term maintenance manpower supply planning

It is essential that airlines efficiently perform aircraft maintenance in order to ensure aviation safety and schedule punctuality. Traditionally, the arrangement of the maintenance manpower supply has been based on staff experience, and has been performed manually following simple rules. This is not only time-consuming but often ineffective. In this research we consider technicians with multiple types of aircraft maintenance certificates incorporated with three flexible management strategies and the related operating constraints to develop a mathematical programming model. With suitable modifications, eight different flexible strategic models, associated with different strategy combinations, can be generated to help an airline effectively manage its maintenance manpower supply. The models are formulated as mixed integer programs. Because the problem sizes of the proposed models are expected to be huge in real applications, we have developed a solution algorithm to efficiently solve the problems. We employed the mathematical programming solver, CPLEX, to reach a solution for all the problems. Finally, to evaluate the models and solution algorithm developed in the research, we performed a case study using the operating data from a leading Taiwan airline. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed models, and the solution algorithm, are both efficient and effective.