Aircraft maintenance scheduling optimization with the impact of human errors

Aircraft maintenance is essential to ensure aircraft safety and flight schedule reliability. Previous studies are aware of that more than 50% of accidents are caused by human errors in maintenance activities. Airlines and scholars have gradually begun to identify actual and potential hazards associated with human factors, yet these studies are difficult to directly consider human-error effects in real-life aircraft maintenance scheduling optimization problems. In this study, we introduce a quantification method for the impact of maintenance-related human errors on operational costs, and incorporate this impact into an aircraft maintenance scheduling decision framework. Accordingly, we propose an aircraft maintenance scheduling model with human-error impacts. Due to the nonlinear challenge caused by the human-error impact quantification, we develop an efficient matheuristic approach. Computational experiments based on real flight schedules show that human errors have a significant impact on operational costs (i.e., increasing around 16% of total costs in test instances), and reliable aircraft maintenance schedules are obtained by our proposed model that are less vulnerable to human-error impacts. Additionally, the results support the efficiency of our proposed matheuristic approach. This study shows that airline managers should consider the impact of human errors when scheduling maintenance tasks. We provide a reference for the integration of human-error effects and maintenance scheduling optimization across various industries.