DOI: 10.3390/app162110911 ISSN: 2076-3417

Chance-Constrained Maintenance Feasibility Assessment for Heterogeneous Aviation Equipment Under RSL and Resource Uncertainty

Dong Liu, Yi Ren, Yiyong Xiao

Maintenance of heterogeneous aviation equipment must satisfy health-related obligations, mission availability, and limited resources under uncertainty. This study formulates a single-period chance-constrained mixed-integer linear program (MILP) with uncertain remaining service life (RSL) and maintenance resource availability. Separate confidence levels determine mandatory maintenance and conservative resource capacities. The principal contribution is an exact reduction of this formulation to current-period feasibility assessment. Under positive initiation costs, nonnegative downtime costs, and no current-period benefit from optional starts, the mandatory initiation vector is uniquely optimal whenever feasible. We derive a necessary-and-sufficient feasibility test, an explicit cost expression, and critical confidence levels. The two uncertainty sources interact through maintenance obligations and resource executability; no statistical dependence model or joint probability guarantee is asserted. Reported synthetic experiments with 30–1000 equipment units agree with the direct test. For 3000 equipment–activity pairs, the reported MILP and direct-test median times are 25.89 and 0.75 ms. New comparisons with calibrated sample-average approximation and moment-based distributionally robust planning quantify conservatism on 400 synthetic instances. A moment-matched threshold comparison further illustrates distributional sensitivity. The evidence verifies model structure on controlled inputs; it does not validate aircraft-operator parameters, predictive calibration, or long-term maintenance benefits.

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