Scheduling a Dynamic Aircraft Repair Shop

We study a dynamic repair shop scheduling problem in the context of military aircraft fleet management. A number of flights, each with a requirement for a specific number and type of aircraft, are already scheduled over a long horizon. The overall scheduling horizon is considered to be composed of multiple time periods. The goal is to maintain a full complement of aircraft. We need to assign aircraft to flights and schedule repair activities while considering the repair capacity limit and aircraft failures. The number of aircraft awaiting repair dynamically changes over time because of aircraft failures. We designed three re-scheduling policies using different optimization and heuristic techniques to solve the dynamic problem over successive time periods. Experimental results demonstrate that the wave coverage is higher if the optimization technique, logic-based Benders decomposition, is used to solve the problem over longer time periods more frequently.