Feeder routing for air-to-air refueling operations

Christoph Hansknecht, Imke Joormann, Bernd Korn, Fabian Morscheck and Sebastian Stiller

European Journal of Operational Research, 2023, vol. 304, issue 2, 779-796

Abstract: With the ever increasing volume of air traffic comes an enormous environmental impact, specifically due to carbon emissions. A promising approach to reduce this impact is the introduction of en route air-to-air refueling, allowing for the design of aircraft with reduced weight and a decreased fuel burn. Aside from the design of aircraft, the key challenge lies in the planning of the refueling operation in order to minimize the fuel burn of the feeder fleet. The air-to-air refueling problem is a variant of a vehicle routing problem in which a fleet of feeders are to perform air-to-air refueling operations for a fixed set of cruisers. In this paper, we devise an IP-based method capable of solving this problem supported by an ODE model of the feeders’ fuel consumption. The algorithmic key to solve the air-to-air refueling problem lies in separating the problem of finding routes serving cruisers and assigning sets of routes to individual feeders. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods both on real-world and artificial instances, solving all problems to optimality and significantly outperforming state-of-the-art heuristic methods.

Keywords: Routing; Branch-and-price; Air-to-air refueling; NP-hardness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221722003149
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:304:y:2023:i:2:p:779-796

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2022.04.016

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().