Aircraft-to-Mission Assignment Model for Engine Life Management

Critical aeroengine components, the major failure of which is likely to lead to hazardous effects, have strict limits on their lifetimes. When the parts reach their lifetime limit, they will be replaced or overhauled in depot maintenance (DM). Engine life management (ELM) is used to properly control their exploitation for aviation safety and the efficient application of engines. This study focuses on the efficient operation of aeroengines. The military has established the control line for engines' residual life distribution for uniform DM. ELM controls the use of aeroengines to comply with the control line, which helps reduce the demand of spare engines and improves aircraft availability. The life of the aeroengines is mainly consumed during the flight of the aircraft. ELM can be implemented by the flight scheduling of aircraft. This paper proposes a mixed-integer programming (MIP) model for assigning airplanes to missions considering the goal of ELM. Furthermore, the model is verified by numerical experiments on an instance, and an efficient ELM strategy also is proposed.