LAUSR

Assigning technicians to maintenance tasks at an aircraft maintenance base is challenging and needs to consider technician licences, fairness and such operational constraints as hangar capacity and work shifts. We formulate the problem as a bi-objective optimisation model, which minimises total cost while simultaneously achieving fairness in workload allocation among different technicians. A tabu-based heuristic algorithm is developed to obtain Pareto efficient solutions. The algorithm is shown to be effective through comparison with CPLEX. A case study from a major Chinese airline demonstrates that our optimisation-based approach is applicable and beneficial to the practice. Managerial issues on maintenance workforce management are examined as well. The results show that training technicians and upgrading their licences may not be better off, and increasing the number of technicians has both favourable and unfavourable effects.