Exact and heuristic approaches to reschedule helicopter flights for personnel transportation in the oil industry

Thiago Vieira, Jonathan De La Vega, Roberto Tavares, Pedro Munari, Reinaldo Morabito, Yan Bastos and Paulo César Ribas

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 2021, vol. 151, issue C

Abstract: This paper addresses a real-life short-term rescheduling problem of helicopter flights from one onshore airport to several maritime units in the context of the oil industry. This is a complex and challenging problem to solve because of the particular characteristics observed in practice, such as pending flights transferred from previous days with different recovering priorities, changes in flight timetables and helicopter assignments previously planned for the current day, time windows and minimum time intervals between take-offs from the airport and the maritime units, mandatory flight precedence, maximum flight delays, among many others. The problem consists of determining a daily flight reschedule that satisfies operational constraints and recovers all pending flights, while minimizing flight delays and costs related to helicopter usage and reassignments. We propose two mixed integer programming models to formulate the problem with all relevant characteristics, one based on the extension of traditional network flow models and other that relies on a novel event-based representation of the problem. Additionally, we develop an effective heuristic approach based on constructive and improvement heuristics, able to produce high-quality solutions within acceptable computational times. The results of computational experiments with real-life data provided by an oil company highlight the potential of the proposed approaches to support decision making in this context.

Keywords: Aircraft recovery problem; Mixed integer programming; Flight rescheduling problem; Constructive and improvement heuristics; Helicopters and flights re-assignments; Oil industry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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/S136655452100096X
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:transe:v:151:y:2021:i:c:s136655452100096x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600244/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 600244/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.tre.2021.102322

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review is currently edited by W. Talley

More articles in Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().