Abstract An Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) consists of ships capable of conducting flight operations that daily require the transport of personnel and cargo (PMC) to remain operationally viable. Planning daily PMC transport for ARG ships and nearby airfields is a unique vehicle routing problem characterized by a heterogeneous capacitated vehicle fleet, two cargo types, multiple depots, time windows, and synchronized routing of two aircraft required between some but not all node pairs. We formulate this problem as an integer linear program (ILP) with an objective function that expresses the cost of flight operations and a penalty for undelivered PMC. We perform extensive computational testing using an ILP solver and a tailored ant colony optimization with local search metaheuristic on test instances constructed to represent those found in practice. We find most instances difficult to solve optimally while our heuristic provides the best known or close to the best known solution in just a few minutes. We have embedded our heuristic in a decision support system complete with graphical user interface and sent this out for use by United States Navy ARG planners.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Daily aircraft routing for amphibious ready groups


    Contributors:

    Published in:

    Publication date :

    2017-12-22


    Size :

    22 pages




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




    AMPHIBIOUS AIRCRAFT

    STOLBOV VLADIMIR MIKHAJLOVICH | European Patent Office | 2016

    Free access

    Amphibious aircraft

    ZHENG WEIFENG / OTHER INVENTORS HAVE WAIVED THE RIGHT TO BE MENTIONED | European Patent Office | 2021

    Free access

    ROBUST AMPHIBIOUS AIRCRAFT

    BERNHARDT ROGER D | European Patent Office | 2018

    Free access

    Turbofan amphibious aircraft

    YANG FEI / YANG LIYUAN / ZHANG XIAOFEN | European Patent Office | 2025

    Free access

    ROBUST AMPHIBIOUS AIRCRAFT

    BERNHARDT ROGER D | European Patent Office | 2020

    Free access