Mixed-integer optimization for multi-year military aircraft fleet management

Abstract

While existing strategies for Flight and Maintenance Planning for the defense sector generally address idealized conditions, real-world planning often involve non-nominal initial fleet states and complex inspection schemes. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-year planning strategy that maximizes long-term fleet availability. The formulation incorporates multiple competing objectives capturing the tight coupling between aircraft usage and maintenance, while enforcing cyclic inspection requirements and limited maintenance-dock capacity. To enhance practical applicability, we introduce three complementary strategies: a receding-horizon approach to reduce computational burden, a Bayesian Optimization routine to automatically tune cost-function coefficients, and an aircraft-specific weighting scheme that adapts model priorities based on fleet-condition statistics. Results on three realistic benchmark scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.