关键词: 航空运输, 飞机维修计划编排, 综述, 飞机路径

Abstract: Aircraft needs various maintenance and regular checks to ensure aircraft airworthiness. A low-quality maintenance plan can lead to aircraft requiring far more maintenance during service, reducing the available time of the aircraft. At the same time, unreasonable maintenance intervals prevent the full utilization of maintenance resources. The decline in aircraft utilization and the increase in maintenance costs have an intangible impact on the profitability of airlines. We categorize the aircraft maintenance, specifically describe the existing modeling methods and related algorithms for aircraft maintenance scheduling at different stages, and supplement other research issues related to aircraft maintenance. We intend to provide ideas for airline decision-making while also providing systematic theoretical references and suggestions for academic research in this direction.
We first provide a comprehensive and detailed introduction to the concepts related to aircraft maintenance, including maintenance time interval indicators and the general classification of maintenance in airline operations. Then, according to the length of time before execution, the scheduling is divided into three stages: Long-term scheduling, mid-term scheduling and short-term scheduling. There are significant differences in the types of maintenance planned in these three stages. Long-term scheduling typically targets maintenance that is time-consuming, costly, and has high requirements for locations. It aims to minimize the number of check and maintenance while meeting various maintenance resource limitations and requirements to save costs. The algorithms used in long-term scheduling are briefly introduced, and a two-stage long-term maintenance scheduling method is emphatically illustrated. Mid-term scheduling is a transitional stage between long-term and short-term scheduling. It requires a rough scheduling of maintenance tasks for the next month or more based on the results of long-term scheduling but without considering flight plans. In the short-term scheduling stage, the development of maintenance plans is closely related to flights, with a focus on considering the rationality and robustness of the connection between flights and maintenance. The network modeling of most aircraft maintenance routing problems can be classified into two categories: Path-based and arc-based. Both time-space network and connection network can be used for arc-based modeling, and there are certain differences in the modeling methods of corresponding decision variables. The connection network is more convenient for evaluating the connection quality between aircraft flights, and between flight and maintenance, while the time-space network is more likely to consider the location of aircraft at different times. In addition, there may be some unexpected events in actual operation, such as weather deterioration, damage to maintenance equipment, and the absence of maintenance personnel. These will result in the fact that aircraft is not able to complete the assigned maintenance on time, and the airline will have to recover the aircraft maintenance scheduling in real time to minimize the impact of unpredictable scenarios. Lastly, the maintenance base planning, the allocation of other maintenance resources and maintenance monitoring driven by data are introduced. The optimization of these problems can improve the efficiency of aircraft maintenance. Finally, we find that there are still some optimization directions in aircraft maintenance scheduling and related issues, such as considering more strategic factors in long-term maintenance scheduling, indicators related to scheduled letter checks in short-term maintenance scheduling, and integrating short-term maintenance scheduling and maintenance crew scheduling problems for solution.
This study categorizes research on aircraft maintenance scheduling based on the actual business processes and requirements of airlines. At the same time, various subcategories are further determined based on different modeling formulation, and their application situations are elaborated and analyzed. This classification framework helps scholars to deeply understand the application scenarios of this research direction, in order to discover research problems with application value. On the other hand, identifying future research opportunities should help academic researchers and practitioners to develop new models and improve the performance of the existing models.

Key words: air transportation, aircraft maintenance scheduling, review, aircraft routing