Designing a centralised model to value balance between aircraft uptime and downtime from an integral airline perspective: a case study at KLM E&M

This research aim was to design a centralised model that redefines definitions, standardises maintenance by categorisation, and reduces waste by introducing new slot lengths, leading to an equilibrium between flights and maintenance. This equilibrium enhances the airline’s capacity to manage maintenance efficiently and ensures greater uptime....

Railway - Spare Inventory & Maintenance Scheduling model development

To better govern inventory control of spare parts in tandem with scheduling of maintenance operations in a railway setting, a Railway Spare Inventory & Maintenance Scheduling (R-SIMS) model is developed. To suit the railway industry setting the model includes an inventory control strategy which envokes continuous monitoring and a reorder...

A dynamic optimization model on the routing and maintenance scheduling of aircraft for individual tasks

Increasing competition amongst airlines necessitates them to improve the efficiency of their operations. Even though maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) represent a significant portion of an airline’s operational costs, aircraft maintenance scheduling is often still a manual process, producing suboptimal solutions. Airlines typically operate...

Work Task Order Optimization in Aircraft Hangar Maintenance: A Constraint-Based Heuristic Programming Approach

Scheduled aircraft maintenance consists of a set of work tasks to be executed. This thesis focuses on improving the order in which these work tasks are executed. Because finding an optimum for these kind of problems is computationally intensive, the chosen approach is of heuristic nature, which is a practical method resulting in close-to-optimal...

Constrained Multi-Aircraft Maintenance Scheduling Using Component Prognostics

In recent years, airlines have increasingly developed the ability to monitor the condition of aircraft components by means of sensors. In turn, aircraft maintenance aims to use this sensor data to predict component failures. However, the challenge remains to make use of these prognostics to generate appropriate maintenance schedules. In this...

Optimizing Long-Term Planning of Railway Maintenance

Railway maintenance is currently planned according to a fixed schedule, mostly of one year. This is usually not optimal when considering the cost of maintenance, of possessions and of failure. However, an approach that minimizes the sum of these costs was not yet available. This paper presents a statistical analysis method and an optimization...