Scheduling the Repairment of Aircrafts' Engines

In this paper a real world scheduling problem concerning the repair process of aircrafts" engines by TAP - Maintenance & Engineering (TAP-ME), is addressed. TAP-ME is the maintenance, repair and overhaul organization of TAP Portugal, Portugal's leading airline. A mixed integer linear programming formulation based on the flexible job shop scheduling, allowing operations to be executed on the same workstation by any processor of a given set, with the objective of minimizing the total weighted tardiness, is presented. Computational experiments on a real instance provided by TAP-ME from a regular working week were successful in finding an optimal solution. Additionally the model was tested using benchmarking instances available in literature.