Current Practices and Problem Areas in Aircraft Maintenance Planning and Scheduling – Interfaced/Integrated System Perspective

Aircraft maintenance planning and scheduling constitute planning, control and execution of materials (spare parts), operations (inspection, disassembly and assembly activities) and resources (labour, machines, transport equipment, etc.). This is a complex problem due to large number of components involved at various planning and execution levels, and the size/nature of resource-intensive maintenance projects. This paper reports current practices, problem areas and issues in aircraft maintenance planning and scheduling using both interfaced and integrated systems, based on a case study. The case study involves one airline in the region and an industry solution for aircraft maintenance planning and scheduling. Problem areas and issues within interfaced systems are reported, based on the selected airline while issues and potential improvements on the selected solution are identified based on a numerical study. Testing of maintenance planning and scheduling, based on maintenance order cycle within maintenance project, show that planning and scheduling methods in the industry solution can be enhanced by eliminating weaknesses of individual techniques involved. The paper concludes that key improvement areas on the planning and scheduling processes within an integrated system environment are simultaneous planning of materials, operations and resources involved, forward planning of operations/tasks, and finite loading of resources. Potential benefits from improvements include reduction in spare-parts inventory, shorter turn-around times and cost reduction in overtime.