Trade-off between facility utilization and service level of an airline MRO

This study aims to arrive at methods for cost-optimizing the resources of a maintenance hangar, to provide required reliability of service by investigating the trade-off between facility utilization and service levels. Drawing principles from queuing theory to quantify service levels, we use as a general methodology, simulation of the concerned queue to estimate the performance measures of the system. A major portion of this study involved collecting, compiling and including critical inputs from an Indian national carrier’s MRO unit and a third party MRO service provider. This provided insight into the working of an MRO industry, and enabled us to characterize relevant parameters such as the incoming traffic using typical data about the frequency; quality and quantity of the maintenance process in terms of servicing times and the various factors of uncertainty therein, and also the performance parameters used in industry and their process of planning. A tool was developed to generate baseline schedules, compare different queuing schemes and analyze the effect of various uncertainties on the schedules. This can help reduce planning time as currently it is done manually. A type of Priority Queuing – first by priority of customers and then ascending order of turnaround times was found to be better than queuing simply by ascending turnaround times or FCFS in terms of reliability – i.e., greater number of jobs done within promised turnaround times.