Preventive maintenance scheduling of fleet of aircraft using contiguous-cells transportation model: a case study

A fresh drive to increase effective aircraft-fleet operating hours has ignited interest in finding new ways to manage aircraft maintenance and flight schedules. Contiguous-cells optimisation, a recently developed approach to assets management, was reported to have yielded logistics advantages. This paper explores the feasibility and consequences of its application to aircraft-fleet alternate flight and preventive maintenance scheduling. A performance measure was formulated in terms of aircraft arrival period, maintenance duration and cost as parameters while completion period and flight-months are variables. A contiguous-cell transportation problem was defined and solved as that of combined flight-loss and maintenance cost minimisation. It was illustrated using a commercial airline with ten-aircraft fleet and two-dock maintenance workshop in Southwestern Nigeria. The cost ₦13,303 × 106; flight-months 212; and idle-months three; favourably compare with ₦24,234 × 106, 185, and 30 of the existing schedule, respectively. Thus, the approach appears feasible with the potential of increasing effective aircraft operating hours at a lower cost.