Modifying lines-of-flight in the planning process for improved maintenance robustness

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...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computers & operations research Vol. 39; no. 9; pp. 2051 - 2062
Main Authors: Lapp, Marcial, Cohn, Amy
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Kidlington Elsevier Ltd 01.09.2012
Elsevier
Pergamon Press Inc
Subjects:
Air transportation and traffic
Aircraft
Aircraft components
Aircraft maintenance
Airline planning
Airline scheduling
Applied sciences
Deviation
Disruption
Exact sciences and technology
Ground, air and sea transportation, marine construction
Maintenance
Mathematical programming
Operations research
Repair & maintenance
Robustness
Scheduling
Studies
United States > US
Airline planning
Robustness
Aircraft maintenance
Process planning
Flight
Routing
Scheduling
Maintenance
Reachability
Airplane
Air transportation
Overhead line
Metric
Planning
Incomplete information
Aircraft
Mathematical programming
ISSN:0305-0548, 1873-765X, 0305-0548
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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.
Bibliography:SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 14
ObjectType-Article-2
content type line 23
ISSN:0305-0548
1873-765X
0305-0548
DOI:10.1016/j.cor.2011.08.024