Optimisation of Aircraft Maintenance Schedules

We present an aircraft maintenance scheduling problem, which requires suitably qualified staff to be assigned to maintenance tasks on each aircraft. The tasks on each aircraft must be completed within a given turn around window so that the aircraft may resume revenue earning service. This paper presents an initial study based on the application of an Evolutionary Algorithm to the problem. Evolutionary Algorithms evolve a solution to a problem by evaluating many possible solutions, focusing the search on those solutions that are of a higher quality, as defined by a fitness function. In this paper, we benchmark the algorithm on 60 generated problem instances to demonstrate the underlying representation and associated genetic operators.