Scheduling the repair of aircraft components - a case study

Avelino, C.; Bourne, D.P.; Ferreira, F.; Rasteiro, D.; Santos, J.

Abstract

In aircraft components maintenance shops, components are distributed amongst repair groups and their respective technicians based on the type of repair, on the technicians skills and workload, and on the customer required dates. This distribution planning is typically done in an empirical manner based on the group leader’s past experience. Such a procedure does not provide any performance guarantees, leading frequently to undesirable delays on the delivery of the aircraft components. Among others, a fundamental challenge faced by the group leaders is to decide how to distribute the components that arrive without customer required dates. This paper addresses the problems of prioritizing the randomly arriving of aircraft components (with or without pre-assigned customer required dates) and of optimally distributing them amongst the technicians of the repair groups. We proposed a formula for prioritizing the list of repairs, pointing out the importance of selecting good estimators for the interarrival times between repair requests, the turn-around-times and the man hours for repair. In addition, a model for the assignment and scheduling problem is designed and a preliminary algorithm along with a numerical illustration is presented.

Citation

Avelino, C., Bourne, D., Ferreira, F., Rasteiro, D., & Santos, J. (2016). Scheduling the repair of aircraft components - a case study. Mathematics-in-industry case studies, 7(1), Article 5. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40929-016-0007-2

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 26, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Jul 22, 2016
• Publication Date: Jul 22, 2016
• Deposit Date: Dec 9, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 12, 2016
• Journal: Mathematics-in-Industry Case Studies
• Electronic ISSN: 1913-4967
• Publisher: Springer
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 1
• Article Number: 5
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40929-016-0007-2
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1397692