Helicopter routing model with non-deterministic failure rate for evacuation of multiple oil platforms

Abstract

Transportation between offshore oil platforms and land facilities is an important subject within emergency logistics. Although for these facilities helicopters have been considered as the most appropriate transportation vehicles due to their speed, reliability and accessibility, they also involve risks which can lead to fatalities. Within this context, the present work is focused on the development of a helicopter routing model that integrates non-deterministic failure rate as function of the helicopter’s cumulative traveled distance/time. Due to the complexity of the transportation task we also developed a Bayesian approach to generate instances for accurate testing and an evolutionary meta-heuristic to provide suitable solutions for large instances. As findings, the proposed routing model determined that reliable transportation decreases as failure rate increases. As consequences, the time-to-failure and the length of reliable flights decrease. This can lead to require more routes and helicopters to serve a set of facilities. The advances of the present work can be extended to other industries and logistic fields where reliable route planning is required in the presence of failure risks associated to the vehicles used for transportation (i.e., maritime and port logistics, risk and security management, transportation systems design and strategic sourcing and procurement).