Short-term aviation maintenance technician scheduling based on dynamic task disassembly mechanism.

• The finish time and total costs are extracted as the optimization objectives based on problem characteristics. • The dynamic task disassembling mechanism (DTDM) and four technician scheduling modes are novelly proposed. • A flexible time is introduced into DTDM to provide decision-makers with a larger pool of choices to meet specific needs. • A new solution method suitable for both AMTS model and ATMS-DTDM model is designed based on PSO and MOPSO algorithms. This paper focuses on the aviation maintenance technician scheduling (AMTS) problem and formulates AMTS and AMTS-DTDM model with a practical dynamic task disassembly mechanism (DTDM) and arrange maintenance technicians across shifts in short-term maintenance situations (less than 24–48 h). In DTDM, four technician scheduling modes are devised to flexibly disassemble the overtime work or reassigned it to other maintenance technicians according to work efficiency and progress, which could shorten the maintenance time and save the total cost. Moreover, a flexible time interval is designed to adjust the boundary of task disassembly. To further study the effectiveness of DTDM in reducing maintenance time and total costs, this paper divides both the AMTS and AMTS-DTDM models into three sub-models (i.e., two single-objective models and one multi-objective model), respectively. After that, we design solution methods as well as the encoding schemes compatible with both the AMTS model and the AMTS-DTDM model for different problem scales. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of DTDM, four groups of experiments are set up and particle swarm optimization (PSO) and multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) are applied to compare AMTS and AMTS-DTDM sub-models. The experimental results show that the AMTS-DTDM model can effectively shorten the maintenance time and reduce the total costs for different scaled problems. Furthermore, the flexible time interval can facilitate more options for airlines to adjust the two above objectives to a small extent. The increase in flexible time may weaken the advantages of the AMTS-DTDM model while improving the rationality of the ultimate technician scheduling scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]