Flight rescheduling in air transport to maritime units via constraint programming

• Grant number: 24/22829-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: March 01, 2025
• End date: February 28, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Production Engineering - Operational Research
• Principal Investigator: Mateus Pereira Martin
• Grantee: Gabriel Silva Moris
• Host Institution: Centro de Ciências em Gestão e Tecnologia (CCGT). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). Campus de Sorocaba. Sorocaba , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 22/05803-3 - Cutting, packing, lot-sizing, scheduling, routing and location problems and their integration in industrial and logistics settings, AP.TEM

Abstract

We address variants of the Aircraft Recovery Problem (ARP), motivated by the practical application of daily employee transportation between the coast and offshore units of a company in the oil and gas sector. In this context, the ARP becomes relevant due to unforeseen events, such as adverse weather conditions or mechanical failures, which result in delays or postponements of scheduled flights, disrupting the operation of offshore units and the scheduling of employee shifts. In general, at the beginning of each day, flight rescheduling is essential to include postponed flights from previous days while maintaining the flights scheduled for that day. While respecting flight precedence constraints for safety purposes, the ARP's objective involves prioritizing multiple decisions aimed at minimizing logistical costs. This includes rescheduling all flights to integrate those previously postponed, using aircraft with lower operational costs, and reducing the impact of rescheduling on delays in the original schedule. This project focuses on ARP variants that consider subsets of mandatory flights, constraints related to different helicopter rental contracts, mandatory crew lunch breaks, multiple airports, and lexicographic decisions to prioritize the problem's multiple objectives. To this end, the project proposes extending a Constraint Programming model from the literature, originally developed for a reference ARP, to incorporate the decisions and constraints of the addressed variants. The validation of the proposed approaches will be carried out through computational experiments, using case studies based on instances from the literature and, potentially, real-world company data.