Helicopter recovery in an oil and gas industry: Model and solution approaches

Although optimization techniques have been successfully applied for a number of airline operations, aircraft recovery remains a challenge for both practitioners and researchers due to its complexity and the usual need of a quick response in practical settings. In this paper, we consider the case of a Brazilian oil and gas company that uses a heterogeneous fleet of helicopters for passenger transportation from a few mainland aerodromes to maritime units. The major difficulties in rescheduling delayed flights are resource limitations and realistic features of the company combined with safety and management practices. The problem consists of determining joint daily flight reschedules for all aerodromes that satisfy operational constraints and recovers all pending flights, while minimizing flight transfers among aerodromes, usage of helicopters and overall flight delays. We propose a mixed integer programming (MIP) model, aiming to appropriately represent the problem, and MIP-based local search and two-phase heuristics to cope with larger realistic problem instances. Computational results obtained with instances collected in the case study show the potential of these approaches to deal with this real-life aircraft recovery problem.