Long term planning of military aircraft flight and maintenance operations
This work addresses a specific problem for military logistics, but it is incremental as it extends existing methods to a new time horizon without major breakthroughs.
The authors tackled the long-term planning of military aircraft flight and maintenance operations, a problem previously studied only for short- and medium-term horizons, by formulating an exact Mixed Integer Programming model and analyzing its performance on scenarios inspired by the French Air Force fleet, with a heuristic developed to generate fast feasible solutions that sometimes aided in warm-starting the model.
We present the Flight and Maintenance Planning (FMP) problem in its military variant and applied to long term planning. The problem has been previously studied for short- and medium-term horizons only. We compare its similarities and differences with previous work and prove its complexity. We generate scenarios inspired by the French Air Force fleet. We formulate an exact Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) model to solve the problem in these scenarios and we analyse the performance of the solving method under these circumstances. A heuristic was built to generate fast feasible solutions, that in some cases were shown to help warm-start the model.