An airline maintenance manpower planning model with flexible strategies

An effective maintenance manpower supply plan not only reduces operating costs but ensures greater aviation safety and punctuality. A variety of flexible management strategies have been widely applied in other industries; however, little research has stressed flexible management strategies for airline crew scheduling problems. Here, we introduce a model that includes various flexible strategies so that an airline can effectively manage its maintenance manpower supply. The model is formulated as a mixed integer program that is solved using a commercial software package, CPLEX. In order to evaluate the model performance, we use the operating data from a leading Taiwan airline. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.