An Ant Colony Optimization with Turn-Around-Time Reduction Mechanism for the Robust Aircraft Maintenance Routing Problem

The robust aircraft maintenance routing problem (RAMRP) is adopted by airlines to determine aircraft routes with better withstanding for possible disruptions. This can be achieved using a common approach called the buffer time insertion approach (BT). From the literature, it was observed that this approach has a pitfall of reducing the fleet productivity while inserting long buffer times. Besides, it cannot accommodate flight delays while inserting short buffer times. These disadvantages were the motivation to conduct this study to propose a RAMRP solution that incorporates a novel robustness approach, called turn-around-time reduction (TR), in which all the previous drawbacks are avoided. An ant colony-based algorithm (AC) was developed to solve the proposed RAMRP. To demonstrate the viability and effectiveness of the proposed approach, experiments are conducted based on real data obtained from a major airline company located in the Middle East. The results show that the proposed TR outperforms the existing BT in terms of fleet productivity and delay accommodation.