Heuristic approaches for flight and maintenance planning

In this paper, we consider a Flight and Maintenance Planning (FMP) problem where the decisions regarding wh ich helicopter should fly and for how long, and which helicopter should be undergoing maintenance and when, are addressed. The algorithms solve a military helicopter fleet planning problem with complex maintenance/inspection routine and deployment requirements. The objectives are to minimise deviation from the flight requirements and to minimise transfer costs due to deployments. This work presents and compares Enhanced Aircraft Flowchart Diagram heuristic, neighbourhood search, and variable neighbourhood search algorithms. The results show that the current Aircraft Flowchart Diagram technique can be improved by using neighbourhood search algorithms. Our results suggests the use of multiple variable neighbourhood search algorithms to get high quality solutions without spending too much of computational effort.