Optimizing Helicopter Transport of Oil Rig Crews at Petrobras

Abstract

Petrobras produces nearly 90 percent of Brazil's oil at about 80 offshore oil platforms. It transports approximately 1,900 employees daily between these platforms and four mainland bases, using more than 40 helicopters that vary in capacity, operating costs, and performance characteristics. Each day, flight planners must select the helicopter routes and schedules that satisfy passenger demands. We developed a system that requires less than one hour to generate optimized flight plans that meet operational guidelines, improve travel safety, and minimize operating costs. By using this system, Petrobras reduced its number of offshore landings by 18 percent, total flight time by 8 percent, and flight costs by 14 percent, resulting in annual savings of more than $20 million. Our optimization model is a large-scale mixed integer program that generalizes prior helicopter routing models. We designed a column-generation algorithm that exploits the problem structure to overcome its computational difficulties. As part of the solution method, we use a network flow model to optimally assign passengers to selected routes.

A heuristic approach to stowing general cargo into platform supply vessels

“…We do not refer to the planning of the exploratory assets, but rather to the role of the offshore support vessels in the process of extracting and processing oil and natural gas (readers interested in the planning and scheduling of offshore drilling rigs can refer to Bassi et al (2012)). Nor have we considered worker and crew transportation, which has been mostly carried out by helicopters (Menezes et al, 2010;Qian et al, 2011). In regard to AHTS vessels, which are responsible for towing drilling units and anchoring them to the seafloor, Shyshou et al (2010) studied a fleet design problem using discrete event simulation.…”

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

“…Among the few published research papers on the helicopter routing to offshore installations, Moreno et al [11] and Menezes et al [12] seek to minimize the flight costs, the number of flights, and the total number of offshore landings in order to improve helicopter flight safety. Qian et al [13] introduced a risk measure for passenger transportation by helicopter and defined a safe passenger helicopter transportation problem as a vehicle routing problem with pickups and deliveries with a risk objective in terms of the expected number of fatalities.…”

Optimization Modeling for Logistics: Options and Implementations

“…2010), service and parts network design (Sen et al. 2010), passenger railway capacity management (Gopalakrishnan and Rangaraj 2010), helicopter transportation (Menezes et al. 2010), vehicle routing (Bell and Griffis 2010), spreadsheet modeling (Galbreth and LeBlanc 2010), strategic inventory (Shapiro and Wagner 2010), and order crossover (Srinivasan et al.…”