A bi-level heuristic maintenance scheduling framework for an aircraft fleet under uncertain mission scenarios

The aircraft fleet is typically required to perform a series of missions with finite breaks between two adjacent missions. Fleet performance can be significantly improved by having multiple teams perform timely maintenance activities on damaged aircraft during each break. However, maintenance scheduling optimization in this case is inherently constrained by the limited resources, coupled with the wide variety of ways to allocate aircraft among teams. In this paper, we develop a new maintenance scheduling framework that aims to maximize the expected readiness rate of the fleet. Additionally, we consider the uncertainty in the start time and demand of the next mission and develop a bi-level heuristic algorithm to efficiently solve the resulting optimization problem. The effectiveness of the proposed method is also tested with an example of twelve aircraft in two teams.