Title
Modifying lines-of-flight in the planning process for improved maintenance robustness
Abstract
As a part of their planning process, airlines construct lines-of-flight (LOFs ) - daily repeating sequences of flights, each of which will be flown by a single aircraft. In the week leading up to the actual day-of-operations, these LOFs are then assigned to specific aircraft (tails), forming multi-day aircraft routings that in turn enable the scheduling of routine maintenance checks. Operational disruptions, however, can lead to deviations from these routings, which in turn disrupt the maintenance plan. The goal of our research is to improve the construction of LOFs so as to increase the likelihood of being able to recover from maintenance disruptions without costly over-the-day aircraft swaps. We present a new metric, maintenance reachability (MR), which measures the robustness of a planned set of LOFs, and develop a mathematical programming approach to improving the MR of a given set of LOFs. We provide computational results based on data from a major U.S. carrier demonstrating that significant improvements in MR can be achieved with only a small number of changes to the original set of LOFs. Finally, we conclude by showing that even under imperfect input data, MR can be improved relative to a planned set of LOFs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1016/j.cor.2011.08.024
Computers and Operations Research
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Modifying lines-of-flight,maintenance disruption,improved maintenance robustness,routine maintenance check,planning process,maintenance reachability,costly over-the-day aircraft swap,single aircraft,planned set,original set,maintenance plan,specific aircraft,multi-day aircraft routings
Journal
39
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
9
0305-0548
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.42
7
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marcial Lapp1101.82
Amy Cohn2204.97