A rig-based formulation and a league championship algorithm for helicopter routing in offshore transportation

Abstract

Crew must be transported to offshore platforms to regulate the production of oil and gas. Helicopter is the preferred means of transportation, which incurs a high cost on oil and gas companies. So, flight schedule should be planned in a way that minimizes the cost (or equivalently the makespan) while considering all conditions related to helicopter’s maximum flight time, passenger and weight capacity, and arrival time of crew members to airport. Therefore, a mathematical formulation is proposed in this paper that has the objective of minimizing the finish time of the final tour of the helicopter (i.e., makespan) while taking the above-mentioned conditions into account. The model is solved for problems that have at most 11 rigs, which results in optimal solution in a reasonable amount of time. For large-size problems for which the computational effort for finding exact solution is not possible in an efficient way, a metaheuristic, namely League Championship Algorithm (LCA), is proposed. Computational experiments demonstrate that LCA can find good solutions efficiently, so it may be employed for large-size helicopter routing problems in an efficient manner.