Institute of Transportation, MOTC

Aircraft maintenance is a very important part in aviation safety. Base maintenance in an aircraft maintenance company is mainly responsible for regular maintenance. Due to the long period of base maintenance, the aircraft maintenance company use short space apron in hangar to increase the maintenance energy and efficiency. Aircraft usually change apron due to maintenance requirements during the maintenance process. If the moving route of the aircraft may collide with other aircraft which must interrupt the maintenance and moving at the same time to ensure the aircraft moving safety, which is called the blocking problem of the aircraft. When aircraft is blocked, it will cause unnecessary movement of other aircrafts, which may decrease the maintenance efficiency, increases the cost and maintenance errors. Therefore, we develop the optimization model of apron assignment base on the aircraft maintenance company’s opinion.

We use zero-one integer program and network flow techniques developing the model to reach the minimum numbers of moving times. We solve it by using the C++ to code the program and mathematical programming solver, CPLEX. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the model with reasonable data given by aircraft maintenance company in practice, conduct the sensitive analysis and situational analysis by different parameters and situations. The results show that the model could be useful for aircraft maintenance company in practice.