Aircraft maintenance workforce scheduling: A case study

This paper describes an actual aircraft maintenance labor scheduling study. The study's objective is to determine the optimum maintenance workforce schedule to satisfy growing labor requirements with minimum cost. The main recommendation of the study is to switch from a five-day to a seven-day workweek for aircraft maintenance workers. A new integer programming formulation, used to obtain an optimum seven-day work schedule with no increase in workforce size, is presented. In comparison to the existing five-day schedule, switching to a seven-day workweek is expected to produce savings of about 13 per cent, or $100,000 annually.