Passenger and pilot risk minimization in offshore helicopter transportation

Fubin Qian, Irina Gribkovskaia, Gilbert Laporte, Øyvind Halskau

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

25 Citations (SciVal)

Abstract

In the offshore petroleum industry, employees are transported to and from the offshore installations by helicopter, which represents a major risk. This paper analyzes how to improve transportation safety by solving the helicopter routing problem with a risk objective expressed in terms of expected number of fatalities. A mathematical model is proposed and a tabu search heuristic is applied to this problem. Three routing policies are considered: a direct routing policy, a Hamiltonian routing policy, and a general routing policy. Extensive computational experiments are conducted on instances derived from real data in order to assess and compare these policies under a travel time, a passenger risk and a combined passenger and pilot risk objective. Several management insights can be derived from this study. In particular, our results show that passenger transportation risk can be reduced by increasing travel time at the expense of pilot risk. This can be achieved through a reduction of the average number of passengers onboard by applying either a Hamiltonian or a general routing policy. Our methodology can also be used to derive an equitable distribution of risk between passengers and pilots, considering that pilots fly much more frequently than passengers.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)584-593
Number of pages10
JournalOmega
Volume40
Issue number5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2012

Funding

The Helicopter Safety Study 3 (HSS-3) was sponsored by eight oil companies operating on the Norwegian continental shelf. The authors are grateful for the support received from this project, especially from Per Hokstad and Ivonne Herrera. We thank Jan Erik Price, from the helicopter operator CHC Norway, for his generous assistance during this research. This work was partially supported by the Canadian Natural Science and Engineering Council under grant 39682-10. This support is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are due to the referees for their valuable comments.

Keywords

  • Helicopter transportation
  • Pickup and delivery routing problem
  • Risk minimization
  • Tabu search heuristic

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Strategy and Management
  • Management Science and Operations Research
  • Information Systems and Management

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