Improved Ant Colony Optimization for the Operational Aircraft Maintenance Routing Problem with Cruise Speed Control

The operational aircraft maintenance routing problem (OAMRP) plays a critical part in producing considerable cost reductions for airlines, since its solution directly influences the number of operating leased aircraft. To reduce the quantity of required aircraft, adopting cruise speed control in OAMRP is a good strategy. In this paper, we investigate the OAMRP with cruise speed control. The objective is to minimize the required quantity of aircraft by finding the optimal aircraft routes through cruise time optimization. The focus is on solving two issues simultaneously: (i) optimization of cruise times and (ii) determination of aircraft routes. Since the combination of two intricate sets of decisions poses significant methodological challenges, the difficulty lies in how to efficiently solve it. Accordingly, the goal of this study is twofold: (i) to design a preprocessing step to reduce the network size and (ii) to develop an improved ant colony optimization (IACO) algorithm with a new state transition mechanism to provide the guidance for cruise times optimization and a new pheromone updating mechanism to enhance the search efficiency and precision. Using data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), we demonstrate the computational efficiency of the preprocessing step and the IACO algorithm.