Human resources allocation for aircraft maintenance with predefined sequence

There are always large-scale items in the maintenances schedule of aircraft system, many of which have been fixed to be done in predefined sequences, which leads the workflow to be systematically complex and makes this kind of problem quite different from all sorts of existing job-selection modes. On the other hand, the human resources are always limited and men have different working capabilities on different items, which make the allocation operation of human resources be much roomy. However, the final total time span of maintenance is often required to be as short as possible in many practices, in order to suffer only the lowest cost of loss while the system is stopping. A new model for optimizing the allocation if aircraft maintenance human resources with the constraint of predefined sequence is presented. The genetic algorithm is employed to find the optimal solution that holds the shortest total time span of maintenance. To generate the ultimate maintenance work items and the human resource array, the sequences among all maintenance work items are considered firstly, the work item array is then generated through traversal with the constraint of maintenance sequence matrix, and the human resources are finally allocated according to the work item array with the constraint of the maintenance capability. An example is demonstrated to show that the model and algorithm behave a satisfying performance on finding the optimal solution as expected.