EU/ME - the metaheuristics community

A large neighbourhood search heuristic for the aircraft and passenger recovery problem

by Serge Bisaillon, Jean-François Cordeau, Gilbert Laporte and Federico Pasin

Abstract

This paper introduces a large neighbourhood search heuristic for an airline recovery problem combining fleet assignment, aircraft routing and passenger assignment. Given an initial schedule, a list of disruptions, and a recovery period, the problem consists in constructing aircraft routes and passenger itineraries for the recovery period that allow the resumption of regular operations and minimize operating costs and impacts on passengers. The heuristic alternates between construction, repair and improvement phases, which iteratively destroy and repair parts of the solution. The aim of the first two phases is to produce an initial solution that satisfies a set of operational and functional constraints. The third phase then attempts to identify an improved solution by considering large schedule changes while retaining feasibility. The whole process is iterated by including some randomness in the construction phase so as to diversify the search. This work was initiated in the context of the 2009 ROADEF Challenge, a competition organized jointly by the French Operational Research and Decision Analysis Society and the Spanish firm Amadeus S.A.S., in which our team won the first prize.

by Y. Kergosien, Ch. Lenté, D. Piton and J.-C. Billaut

Abstract

The problem studied in this paper stems from a real application to the transportation of patients in the Hospital Complex of Tours (France). The ambulance central station of the Hospital Complex has to plan the transportation demands between care units which require a vehicle. Some demands are known in advance and the others arise dynamically. Each demand requires a specific type of vehicle and a vehicle can transport only one person at a time. The demands can be subcontracted to a private company which implies high cost. Moreover, transportations are subject to particular constraints, among them priority of urgent demands, disinfection of a vehicle after the transportation of a patient with contagious disease and respect of the type of vehicle needed. These characteristics involve a distinction between the vehicles and the crews during the modeling phase. We propose a modeling for solving this difficult problem and a tabu search algorithm inspired by Gendreau et al. (1999). This method supports an adaptive memory and a tabu search procedure. Computational experiments on a real-life instance and on randomly generated instances show that the method can provide high-quality solutions for this dynamic problem with a short computation time.

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