Particle swarm optimization with a mutation operator for solving the preventive aircraft maintenance routing problem

Aircraft Maintenance Routing (AMR) is one of the major optimization problems in the airline industry. In this study, we present a mathematical formulation for the daily AMR problem which aims to minimize the risk of both scheduled and non-scheduled maintenance costs. Exact methods may fail to deal with such problems. Our contribution is then to examine the use of an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm by a uniform mutation operator for solving this probabilistic problem. Computational results show that our hybrid approach gives competitive results comparing to the native binary PSO.