The Aircraft Maintenance Routing Problem

The airline network is one of the world's most sophisticated, yet very complex, networks. Airline planning and scheduling operations have posed many great logistics challenges to operations researchers. Optimizing flight schedules, maximizing aircraft utilization, and minimizing aircraft maintenance costs can drastically improve the airlines' resource management, competitive position and profitability. However, optimizing today's airline complex networks is not an easy task. There are four major optimization problems in the airline industry including flight scheduling problem, fleet assignment problem, crew pairing problem, and aircraft maintenance routing problem. These problems have been widely studied over the past few decades. Yet, they remain unsolved due to the size and complexity. In this chapter, we provide a review of advances in optimization applied to these logistics problems in the airline industry as well as give a thorough discussion on the aircraft maintenance routing problem. Several mathematical formulations and solution methods for the aircraft maintenance routing problem will also be presented. Later, we conclude the current research and discuss possible future research of this problem.