Smoothed dynamic scheduling of aircraft engines with off-site warehouse

Efficient aircraft engine scheduling is vital for the reliable operation of flights. However, due to the highly uncertain engine maintenance demands and the special requirement in its logistics operations, airlines are suffering from high cost in maintaining an efficient aircraft engine logistics system. Motivated by real-life problems, this work aims to develop a novel smoothed dynamic scheduling method for aircraft engine to decrease its cost and improve its ability in coping with uncertainties. Specifically, this work coordinates the decisions in different steps and develops an integrated engine scheduling model. Based on which, a dynamic scheduling method is proposed that could cope with both emergency demand and changes of regular demand with integrated rolling-horizon and event-driven method. Besides, the concept of switching cost is introduced to propose smoothed dynamic decisions, which could trade off between plan changes and cost savings. Furthermore, this work investigates the effect of setting an off-site warehouse for the performance of engine scheduling in terms of cost savings. Extensive experiments have been conducted to verify the proposed method, and several managerial implications are also proposed.