Maintenance capacity planning, spare parts management, and maintenance scheduling: An overview

Capacity planning, spare parts management, and scheduling are three important challenges within maintenance management. The purpose of this chapter is to present an overview of these challenges and of proposed solutions to address them, particularly in aviation maintenance, given the attention that this sector has received from both operations managers and researchers. The presented solutions are framed within business analytics (BA), which comprises descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive perspectives. Unlike manufacturing, in which most tasks are deterministic by nature, characterized by well-defined execution lead times and required resources, being it labor, tools, or parts and materials, maintenance, on the contrary, is inherently stochastic. The sources of uncertainty associated with maintenance management, namely in capacity planning, spare parts management, and scheduling, are also explored and discussed.