Scheduling a Dynamic Aircraft Repair Shop with Limited Repair Resources
  We address a dynamic repair shop scheduling problem in the context of
military aircraft fleet management where the goal is to maintain a full
complement of aircraft over the long-term. A number of flights, each with a
requirement for a specific number and type of aircraft, are already scheduled
over a long horizon. We need to assign aircraft to flights and schedule repair
activities while considering the flights requirements, repair capacity, and
aircraft failures. The number of aircraft awaiting repair dynamically changes
over time due to failures and it is therefore necessary to rebuild the repair
schedule online. To solve the problem, we view the dynamic repair shop as
successive static repair scheduling sub-problems over shorter time periods. We
propose a complete approach based on the logic-based Benders decomposition to
solve the static sub-problems, and design different rescheduling policies to
schedule the dynamic repair shop. Computational experiments demonstrate that
the Benders model is able to find and prove optimal solutions on average four
times faster than a mixed integer programming model. The rescheduling approach
having both aspects of scheduling over a longer horizon and quickly adjusting
the schedule increases aircraft available in the long term by 10% compared to
the approaches having either one of the aspects alone.
