Designing a Bi-Level Collaborative Maintenance Planning Approach Between Airline and Service Company Under MRO Outsourcing Practice

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Designing a Bi-Level Collaborative Maintenance Planning Approach Between Airline and Service Company Under MRO Outsourcing Practice

Qin, Yichen / Ng, Kam K.H.

Collaborative planning for aircraft maintenance operations emerges with the transition of aircraft Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) outsourcing practice. Airline outsources its fleet's maintenance operations to an independent MRO service company, involving a cross-organizational aircraft maintenance planning issue with maintenance demand and service supply's matching along the planning period. A bi-level mixed-integer linear programming mathematical formulation is proposed in this paper, which describes the hierarchical relations between airline and MRO company to facilitate planning decision associated with maintenance operations. In the bi-level maintenance planning, airline leads and initiates the collaborative maintenance through its fleet's maintenance plan, then service company is the follower reacting to the MRO demands from airline according to its maintenance capability limits. The bi-level framework aims to reconcile the conflicts between MRO demand and supply. The interdependent relations between MRO demand and supply, as well as the bottleneck in causing planning conflicts are modelled and quantified in the bi-level model. We further proposed an algorithmic framework for solving the proposed bi-level problem.