Maintenance Capability Enhancement and Service Optimization Under MRO Outsourcing Mode

Abstract

This research is motivated by the increasing maintenance demand in the aviation sector and the transition of Maintenances, Repairs, and Operations (MRO) practices adopted by airline companies.

With the expansion of the airlines’ fleet, airline companies begin to adjust their MRO practices, to pursue a trade-off between operating costs, mandatory MRO regulations, and profitability. Outsourcing an airline’s partial MRO to an independent MRO service company becomes a promising option, from an airline’s perspective. Therefore, MRO service companies play an important role in performing series MRO maintenance checks for aircrafts from different airlines and guaranteeing their continuous safety and reliability. However, the internal maintenance resource organization, planning, and external service scheduling are complicated. The transition of MRO practices, therefore, creates a great challenge for MRO service companies.

Accordingly, this research explores MRO maintenance services’ characteristics from the MRO service companies’ perspective. In view of the realistic nature of this problem, several characteristics are studied. Aircraft maintenance hangar capacity is one of the primal features, which has a significant impact on MRO service companies’ service capability.  Aircrafts’ physical non-convex shape in two-dimensional space is investigated and modelled in the hangar parking capacity optimization section, which has not been addressed in literature. Based on geometrical modelling, a multi-period hangar parking layout planning section is carried out, incorporating several practical aircraft movement considerations. Afterward, a multi-skill staffing section is further extended, which fulfils the primal maintenance resources in MRO service planning. Accordingly, several mathematical models are proposed, followed by the respective optimization approaches.

The real-data-based problem instances are adopted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, in view of the MRO service company’s service level enhancement, resource utilization improvement, and resource bottleneck identifications. Meanwhile, several managerial implications regarding maintenance resources level improvements are discussed as well.

The research seminar is supported by the Mainland-Hong Kong University Alliances Activity 2021 – 2022, Shanghai-Hong Kong University Alliance (SHUA), Mainland-Hong Kong University Alliances Activity, University Grants Committee, HKSAR, China.

Speaker

Dr Jason Y. Qin is currently an Assistant Professor with the School of Economics and Management, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, China. He received his PhD degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HKSAR, in 2019.

He has been the Principal Investigator of the research projects granted by the National Science Foundation of China, and the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality.

He has authored and co-authored papers in journals such as Transportation Research Part E, Computers and Operations Research, Applied Mathematical Modelling, and Computers and Industrial Engineering. His research interests include airline operations, smart logistics, data analytics, service management, etc.