On planning cost-efficient and flexible aircraft maintenance operations: Technician shift scheduling and task assignment over multiple bases
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Date
2026
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Abstract
Airlines often outsource aircraft maintenance to third-party providers. As maintenance demand fluctuates, providers must dynamically plan in-house technician schedules, assign tasks to individual technicians, and determine when to rely on external resources, such as on-call shifts or outsourced work. We study how a maintenance provider should decide where (i.e., at which base), when (i.e., within each aircraft’s ground-time window), and by whom (i.e., which in-house technician) to perform each job to make an efficient use of resources and minimize external costs. We model this problem as an integer program and solve it via a Price-and-Branch heuristic with customized pricing models that identify profitable technician work patterns. We present several pricing model variants to explore different forms of technician labor flexibility, including multi-skilling, temporal flexibility (i.e., assigning different shift start times to technicians across workdays), and spatial flexibility (i.e., relocating technicians among maintenance bases). Using data from a maintenance provider, we quantify the potential cost savings associated with each source of labor flexibility. Compared to a base case, multi-skilled technicians offer the most significant cost reductions (48.5%), while the independent use of spatial and temporal flexibilities yields average reductions of 13% and 15%, respectively. Moreover, we observe that most benefits can be achieved with only a fraction of multi-skilled technicians. Overall, our approach obtains a potential cost reduction between 78% and 93%, when compared to a heuristic method that emulates a common practice of maintenance planners.
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Keywords
Aircraft maintenance planning, Task scheduling, Shift scheduling