Institute of Transportation, MOTC

　　It is essential for airlines to efficiently perform aircraft maintenance in order to ensure aviation safety and punctuality. In tradition, the maintenance scheduling, based on staff's experiences, was performed using a simple rule, which is not only time-consuming but also ineffective. In particular, the resulting manpower supply does not easily meet the minimum requirements, possibly causing imbalance between supply and demand. In this research, we develop an integer programming model and use the mathematical programming solver, CPLEX to help airlines efficiently and effectively plan their aircraft maintenance schedules and manpower supplies of uniform certificates for examining a set of aircraft types. Finally, to evaluate the model developed in the research, we perform a case study using the operating data from a major Taiwan airline. The preliminary results show that the model could be useful.