Impact of Long-Term Aircraft Carrier Maintenance Scheduling on the Fleet Readiness Plan

Maintaining the Fleet Readiness Plan (FRP) construct of six aircraft carriers available within 30 days, plus two additional carriers available within 90 days is a difficult task. Maintenance requirements on carriers alone make satisfying the FRP a challenging scheduling problem. We develop a carrier maintenance scheduling model with a goal to meet, as best as possible, the FRP requirements over a ten-year period, while obeying simple maintenance facility constraints. This model allows us to anticipate gaps in coverage and also quantitatively assess the benefit, or burden, of resizing the fleet. We conclude that by increasing the average cycle time for a Carrier Strike Group (CSG) to 27 months we can meet the FRP requirements continuously after an initial maintenance adjustment period of 62 months.Naval Postgraduate School Monterey CA is the author of 'Impact of Long-Term Aircraft Carrier Maintenance Scheduling on the Fleet Readiness Plan', published 2004 under ISBN 9781423522393 and ISBN 1423522397.