| Author: | Dong, Wenzhao |
| Title: | Smoothed dynamic decision-making and network design for aircraft engine logistics |
| Advisors: | Xu, Gangyan (AAE) |
| Degree: | M.Phil. |
| Year: | 2025 |
| Department: | Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering |
| Pages: | ix, 54 pages : illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Aircraft Engine Logistics (AEL) refers to a specific logistics process for aircraft engines that covers all the activities related to the supply, transport, storage, and maintenance of aircraft engines. Efficient AEL is essential in aviation industry as it could ensure the availability and reliability of aircraft engines, thus improve the safety and decrease the delays of flights. In practices, to fulfill the extreme and special requirements in the storage and transportation processes of aircraft engines, airlines have to invest many special physical and human resources to maintain an effective AEL. Meanwhile, due to the uncertainties of engine replacement demands and maintenance time, airlines have to reserve large spaces for engine storage, as well as adjusting its engine scheduling plans accordingly, which greatly increase its operational cost. Thus, reducing the cost of AEL to cope with the increasing competitive aviation industry becomes an important issue for many airlines. Motivated by real-life cases and focus on the scheduling of engines, this work proposes a new dynamic scheduling approach for aircraft engines and investigate the network design of AEL to decrease its operational costs while improving its efficiency. Specifically, this work systematically examines the decisions of engine scheduling over AEL and develops an integrated engine scheduling model. Then a new dynamic scheduling method that integrates Rolling-Horizon and Event-Driven strategies is developed to deal with both emergency and regular engine replacement and maintenance demands. Besides, this work innovatively proposes smoothed dynamic scheduling of aircraft engines, which considers the switching cost of changing scheduling plans in adjacent decision phases. This enables airlines to balance the waste of setup efforts made for original plan and the potential savings on plan adjustment for changed demands. Furthermore, this work investigates the effect of setting up off-site warehouses in AEL network on the performance of engine scheduling in terms of cost savings. Extensive experiments based on real-life cases in Hong Kong have been conducted to verify the performance of the proposed method. From the results, it is found that incorporating rolling-horizon and event-driven method is effective in coping with the uncertainties in aircraft engine scheduling, and could well handle the emergency demands. Besides, smoothed decisions can benefit the companies a lot with low engine demand level, not only on avoiding effort wastes and complains, but also could reduce operation cost. Moreover, off-site warehouse is discussed and found effective in saving the cost of AEL and improving the ability to cope with disturbances only with low engine demand. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
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