Maintenance scheduling and inventory control policy in aviation industry : An integrated framework.

Airlines seek to minimise operating costs, in all aspect of business areas. Some of these areas are the aircraft maintenance and inventory control policies associated.Maintenance is one of the essential operations in aviation industry. Any shortcoming in maintenance causes reducing in the income rate.In addition, there is a direct relationship between maintenance and inventory department in any company is a vital to guarantee the availability of spare parts to carry out the required maintenance.Therefore, this research presents an integrated framework for maintenance scheduling and inventory control policies in aviation industry, aiming to minimise the maintenance cost by addressing a models for determining the optimum maintenance scheduling for aircraft components and its inventory control policy. The interval between maintenance for the components is optimised by minimising the total cost. This consists of labour cost, spare parts cost and delay cost etc.A decision to replace a component must also be taken when a component cannot attain the minimum reliability.Mathematical models are developed to calculate the expected costs based on the cost of corrective, preventive maintenance and the probability of failure. The maintenance scheduling mathematical model is developed to act as a maintenance decision making model to determine the optimum preventive maintenance interval of the expensive aircraft components. A decision making inventory control model to balance the cost of repair and purchase cost is developed and will be integrated with the scheduling maintenance to guarantee the availability of the required components and act as an integrated framework, this would facilitate the decision making process in aviation industry in relation to scheduling and inventory policies.