Building flight planning for an airline company under maintenance constraints

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to provide some heuristic and meta heuristic tools to aid airline companies in flight planning while taking into account maintenance planning. The objective is to maximize aircraft utilization before the maintenance interventions and to smooth the long-term flight load of the aircraft so that maintenance checks are regular for all the fleet.Design methodology approach - The proposed methods, based on operational research solution technics, build a flight planning for an airline company. The simulation of the proposed methods is observed over 40 weeks and evaluated with different problem instances and maintenance policies.Findings - The longest path based method with increasing priority and the simulated annealing are shown to have the best aircraft utilization results.Research limitations implications - Further research could propose some methods which build simultaneous maintenance and flight planning.Practical implications - The economic value and legal considerations of maintenance activities in the airline industry show the importance of maximizing aircraft utilization. The proposed methods are compared to decide the best maintenance policy. These methods are simple and efficient.Originality value - This paper provides a connection between an industrial problem of aircraft maximization under maintenance constraints and operational research. Simple but efficient methods are evaluated in terms of two criteria: aircraft maximization and flight load smoothing.