Parallel Reactive Tabu Search for Aircraft Maintenance Routing

This paper proposes parallel reactive tabu search for an aircraft maintenance routing problem. An aircraft maintenance routing problem is one of the scheduling problems in the airline industry. Optimizing aircraft maintenance routing in airlines' daily operations considering maintenance schedules for each aircraft has a big impact on airlines' management. The objective is to minimize the number of aircraft in operation, the ground time for each aircraft, and the dispersion of flight times for all aircrafts. The optimal aircraft maintenance routing has to satisfy maintenance constraints when assigning aircraft to the already determined timetable for each flight and the specified maintenance schedule. The aircraft maintenance routing is a large-scale and complex problem. However, most of the conventional researches have applied mathematical programming to small-scale problems. Therefore, the application of meta-heuristics should be considered and reactive tabu search is one of the meta-heuristics. The effectiveness of the proposed parallel reactive tabu search based method is verified by comparing it with the conventional tabu search and reactive tabu search based methods. Simulations are conducted with the actual timetable of 150 flights to 12 airports per day for three days.