Shop Floor Scheduling for Program Depot Maintenance Considering Stochastic Repair Needs

摘要

The research supported by this grant investigated new methods to schedule aircraft depot maintenance activities while considering resource constraints and the stochastic nature of task durations. Depot maintenance can be characterized as a large and very complex project scheduling problem. The research resulted in the development of a new method to identify the critical path within resource-constrained project scheduling problems, heuristic search methods that improved overall project completion time by an average of nine percent on test problems, look ahead scheduling methods which further improved project duration, heuristics for improved scheduling when using common resources on multiple projects simultaneously, and heuristics which improved the scheduling of resource-constrained problems when multiple execution modes are available for each task. A windows-based software application was developed which allows a practitioner to use a combination of these methods in order to create good solutions to this complex depot maintenance scheduling problem.