A crow search algorithm for aircraft maintenance check problem and continuous airworthiness maintenance program

This research discusses the maintenance problem of a small commer­cial aircraft with propeller engine, typed ATR-72. Based on the main­­tenance records, the aircraft has average 294 routine activities that have to be monitored and done based on determined threshold interval. This research focuses on developing a meta­heuristic model to optimize the aircraft’s utility, called Crow Search Algorithm (CSA) to solve the Aircraft Maintenance Problem (AMP). The algorithm is developed and tested  whether a younger meta­heuristic method, CSA, is able to give better performance compar­ed to the older methods, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and other hybri­dized method PSO with Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Optimization (PSO-GRASP). Several experiments are performed by using parameters: 1000 maximum iteration and 600 maximum computa­tion time by using four dataset combinations. The results show that CSA can give better performance than PSO but worse than PSO-GRASP

Aircraft Maintenance Routing Problem – A Literature Survey

The airline industry has shown significant growth in the last decade according to some indicators such as annual average growth in global air traffic passenger demand and growth rate in the global air transport fleet. This inevitable progress makes the airline industry challenging and forces airline companies to produce a range of solutions that increase consumer loyalty to the brand. These solutions to reduce the high costs encountered in airline operations, prevent delays in planned departure times, improve service quality, or reduce environmental impacts can be diversified according to the need. Although one can refer to past surveys, it is not sufficient to cover the rich literature of airline scheduling, especially for the last decade. This study aims to fill this gap by reviewing the airline operations related papers published between 2009 and 2019, and focus on the ones especially in the aircraft maintenance routing area which seems a promising branch

An approach to airline MRO operators planning and scheduling during aircraft line maintenance checks using discrete event simulation

The process of scheduling and planning refers to examining aircraft history based on when and where the aircraft should go for service checks. In this paper, the authors focused on line maintenance activities and examined the impact of unexpected factors (Missing tools and safety requirements) on such activities during the process through a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) model. The DES was used to determine the following: 1. The plan time of each maintenance task according to maintenance scheduling based on the X airline company in Libya; 2. A tasks and productivity evaluation which involved examining the number of tasks required to do per check according to the scheduling plan and planned tasks performed by technicians, and; 3. The total elapsed time involved by analysing the average time for each task according to maintenance schedule planning. The results show that, for all scenarios conducted, the DES model was operating at a high level, and in some scenarios, there was a breakdown in service tasks; a clear indication that the workload factor was high during check periods. However, the main finding in this study highlights how a number of different tasks or the breakdown of maintenance work packages were not being completed before the actual time that had been allocated for the general external condition A-check of the aircraft. This made it necessary to study the work package for each check separately and examine these work packages as they relate to DES which presents a potential solution to a more efficient planning approach. This feature enhances the applicability of the proposed method in real-life, and helps airlines cope with the dynamic environment of airline MRO