Model-based solution approach for a short-term flight rescheduling problem in aerial passenger transportation to maritime units

This paper addresses the problem faced by a Brazilian oil and gas company of recovering flights for passenger transportation (mainly teams of employees) to maritime units. Due to unexpected events such as bad weather or aircraft mechanical failures, the original timetable very often cannot be fully met, resulting in flight delays on the same day or even postponements to the following days. As a result, the operation of the maritime units and the scheduling of employee shifts are affected to some extent. Based on a case study conducted at the company, we present a detailed continuous-time mixed-integer programming model that aims to include pending flights in the daily scheduling of an aerodrome with a minimum overall delay and usage of aircraft (helicopters), subject to flights with different rescheduling priorities, aerodrome and aircraft time windows, single runways at the aerodrome and single landing spots at each maritime unit, postponement and shift regulations, heterogeneous fleet of helicopters, mandatory stops for the crew to rest and have lunch, among others. We also present a discrete-time simplification of the former model and some simple solution approaches based on these models in order to cope with larger problem instances. The approach performance is assessed using real-life problem instances whose data were collected in the case study, using a general-purpose optimization software. The results show the potential of these approaches in dealing with this short-term flight rescheduling problem.