Aircraft maintenance scheduling optimization : state-of-the-art and emerging trends

Abstract

Aircraft maintenance is essential to ensuring airworthiness, service reliability and flight punctuality in the aviation industry, which are critical to aviation safety, operation continuity and passenger satisfaction. To achieve these objectives efficiently, aircraft maintenance scheduling (AMS) plays a crucial role in coordinating maintenance activities with complex flight schedules by optimizing resource allocation, reducing downtime, and operational cost. Despite the importance of AMS, comprehensive review of AMS research remains limited, particularly with respect to the evolution and application of advanced scheduling approaches. To address this gap, this study systematically reviews mathematical-model-based approaches published in leading operations research and transportation journals between January 2014 and December 2025. This review synthesized a wide range of literature and organized it into three key areas: maintenance decision-making, solving strategic and tactical choices in task priority and resource allocation; Optimization model, including deterministic, stochastic and dynamic methods to balance efficiency, cost and robustness; And solutions, including exact algorithms, heuristics and data-driven methods. This structural analysis provides clear insights for scheduling decisions and emphasizes the progress of modeling technology and its practical significance. This paper also identifies key research gaps and suggests future research directions for the AMS. By integrating different solution approaches and key findings, this review provides a comprehensive theoretical and operational overview of the current state of the art in AMS.