Scheduling United States Coast Guard helicopter deployment and maintenance at Clearwater Air Station, Florida

To mitigate the effects of a corrosive operating environment, the Coast Guard has planned an extensive preventative maintenance program for its Sikorsky HH60J helicopters based on helicopter flight time. We construct a mixed integer linear program that schedules the weeks during which each helicopter undergoes maintenance, as well as the weeks during which a helicopter conducts operations either at Clearwater Air Station, Florida or at one of two deployment sites. The schedules must consider different maintenance types, maintenance capacity and various operational requirements, e.g., the number of helicopters simultaneously patrolling a deployment site. Using data from the operations at Clearwater, we generate optimal schedules on a Unix workstation with modest computing power in less than 3 min. Planners have been using our mixed integer linear program since January, 2005 for scheduling guidance.