Tactical and Operational Planning of Scheduled Maintenance for Per-Seat, On-Demand Air Transportation

Advances in aviation technology including the development of relatively cheap, very light jets and the possibility of free-flight have led to the realization of a per-seat, on-demand air transportation business that operates without a published flight schedule. One of the decision problems this business faces is planning the scheduled maintenance that has to be done periodically for safety reasons. Careful planning of scheduled maintenance in this dynamic business environment is required to ensure safe and efficient operations. In this paper, we address both tactical and operational planning for scheduled maintenance of per-seat, on-demand air transportation. At the tactical level, we determine the daily maintenance capacities. As the fleet size grows over time, decisions pertaining to when and how much to increase maintenance capacity are made. At the operational level, we assign itineraries to jets and determine the jets to be maintained on a daily basis. We further embed operational maintenance planning into a framework that captures the interaction between maintenance decisions and daily flight scheduling.