Institute of Transportation, MOTC

　　The expense in personnel for airline companies is relatively large among various airline operational costs. Effectively managing the human resource can significantly save operational costs. In particular, the maintenance personnel schedule directly relates to aviation safety and timetable punctuality. Therefore, it becomes an important issue for airline companies. The purpose of maintenance personnel assignment is to assign the technicians into the corresponding work-shifts and maintenance jobs. This study proposed a systematic framework to address the airline short-term maintenance personnel assignment problem. A two-phase model is used to solve the problem. Phase I aims to match the technicians into the working-shifts in different time slots. Phase II pairs the technicians into different squads under functional consideration. Phase I is formulated as a minimum cost flow problem, while Phase II is formulated as a nonlinear integer program. To evaluate the proposed models and solution algorithms, a case study based on the real data from an airline company in Taiwan is used to test the performance of the models and algorithms. The results showed that the proposed models and algorithms are effective and efficient.