Data-driven collaborative optimization between the airline and maintenance service provider: A Bi-level acceleration framework

In aviation operations, the airline and maintenance service provider (MSP) have a close collaborative relationship, and their operational decisions often influence each other. However, in practical operational environments, flight delays negatively affect both stakeholders involved in this decision-making system, which reduces the robustness of the tactical decisions and overall system performance at the operational level. To address this issue, we propose a novel bilevel optimization framework that explicitly models the interaction between maintenance resource allocation and aircraft routing with the consideration of primary delay and delay propagation. To tackle the intrinsic complexity of this NP-hard problem, we design an accelerated bilevel solution approach that integrates customized heuristics for practical scalability. By enabling iterative coordination between the MSP and the airline, our approach allows both parties to optimize their tactical decisions in response to operational disruptions, thereby systematically enhancing the robustness of both aircraft maintenance and routing decisions. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework. Based on seven weekly scenarios, the results show that the proposed bilevel model achieves reduction on the number of flight cancellations and yields notable day-of-operation savings. Comparative results verify that this collaborative decision-making mechanism yields lower operational costs for the airline and improved service efficiency for the MSP, consistently outperforming several baseline models which neglect delay propagation or collaborative mechanisms. These findings demonstrate the potential of our framework as well as solution approach as an intelligent decision support tool for addressing delay-induced disruptions in aircraft maintenance routing. Some actionable insights suach as proactive and flexiable maintenance operations via re-routing are obtained as well.