Heuristic approaches for flight and maintenance planning of large fleets

The nature of military helicopter operations scheduling is such that replanning occurs on a regular basis. With this as a requirement, any solution that takes more than a day to compute is unacceptable. We have shown that this time constraint mitigates against the generation of truly optimum solution using integer programming. Computationally faster, near optimal solutions are a fundamental practical requirement, but the cost of helicopter operations, like that of any aircraft fleet, is large and any sub-optimality will result in substantial cost or operational effectiveness penalties.<br><br>This research has shown that heuristic, meta-heuristic, and their hybrids can make a computationally difficult problem tractable to the level acceptable for solving real lift problem complexities. The result indicate that the computationally fast approaches developed are inevitable sub-optimal but maintain enough quality to significantly improve upon current approaches to FMP and are practically useful. <br>