Passenger and pilot risk minimization in offshore helicopter transportation

Minimization of passenger takeoff and landing risk in offshore helicopter transportation: Models, approaches and analysis

“…Interpreting this well-known result in terms of helicopter transportation, Qian et al [14] demonstrate that an optimal sequence of installations to be visited by a single helicopter in order to minimize the total risk can be found by visiting the installations in non-decreasing order of the pickup demands. Notice that the problem of finding a permutation π that delivers the minimum to the function h k=1 k j=1 p π(j) can be seen as a scheduling problem of processing h jobs on a single machine to minimize the total completion time, provided that p j is the processing time of job j.…”

“…In principle, during a visit both pickup and deliveries may take place, however in this paper we focus on the pickup operations only. See Qian et al [14] for a study of the pickup and delivery operations in a single flight. Computational results in [14] show that for the considered instances the most essential component of the risk associated with offshore transportation is the takeoff and landing risk.…”

“…The term 'Hamiltonian' refers to the fact that each installation is visited exactly once for the combined pickup and delivery within a flight. Qian et al [14] extend the previous work and consider a general routing policy, under which each installation is allowed to be visited twice if necessary, once for delivery and once for pickup. A tabu search heuristic was implemented for real-life instances based on data taken from the Norwegian Continental Shelf.…”

“…A comprehensive study was conducted to gain insights into passenger transportation safety by comparing the solutions obtained from optimizing risk or cost objectives under different helicopter routing policies. In these two papers ( [13], [14]), the helicopter routing problem was defined as VRP, with risk objective which is partly distance dependent (in cruise risk part) and partly sequence dependent (in takeoff and landing risk part). One of the interesting findings of these two papers is that takeoff and landing risks are the major part of the transportation risk for passengers.…”

“…The problem of minimizing the takeoff and landing risk with simultaneous pickups and deliveries for a single flight has been successfully handled by [14]. In the case of several flights, we are still not aware of a possible approach to tackling simultaneous pickup and deliveries by several flights, even uncapacitated.…”