Long term planning of military aircraft flight and maintenance operations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a long-term planning model for military aircraft flight and maintenance operations, extending previous short- and medium-term studies, and evaluates solution methods using scenarios inspired by the French Air Force.

Contribution

It formulates an exact MIP model for long-term military aircraft planning and develops a heuristic to generate quick feasible solutions, enhancing planning efficiency.

Findings

The problem's complexity is proven.

The heuristic provides fast feasible solutions.

Scenario analysis demonstrates model performance.

Abstract

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.