Minimizing takeoff and landing risk in helicopter pickup and delivery operations

Irina Gribkovskaia, Oyvind Halskau and Mikhail Y. Kovalyov

Omega, 2015, vol. 55, issue C, 73-80

Abstract: The problem of minimizing total helicopter passenger risk caused by takeoffs and landings is studied. There are passenger pickup and delivery demands to be satisfied at given points by flights starting and ending in the same heliport and visiting several points. For each point, the delivery demand is the number of passengers to be transported from the heliport to this point and the pickup demand is the number of different passengers to be transported from this point to the heliport. Each pickup and delivery demand must be satisfied in full by one flight. There are an upper bound on the number of flights and an upper bound on the helicopter passenger capacity. The objective function is a linear combination of the numbers of passengers involved in takeoffs and landings at visited points. A solution is characterized by the number of flights, sets of visited points and their sequences for all flights. Properties of optimal solutions are established. Several cases are proved NP-hard. A quadratic boolean programming formulation and two dynamic programming algorithms are suggested for the general case. Computer experiments demonstrated that they are able to solve real-life instances. Polynomial time algorithms are presented for special cases. Implementation of the suggested solutions into the real helicopter operations should decrease the number of fatalities.

Keywords: Combinatorial optimization; Dynamic programming; Routing; Scheduling; Risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305048315000419
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:jomega:v:55:y:2015:i:c:p:73-80

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.omega.2015.02.010

Access Statistics for this article

Omega is currently edited by B. Lev

More articles in Omega from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().