A Flight Route Planning and Scheduling Method for Air Rescue

In air rescue activities, the most common air transportation method is "one flight one destination". Considering the possibility of uneven distribution of demand, perhaps this method is not the best all the time. In this research, the problem of flight routing planning can be regarded as a spilt delivery vehicle routing problem (SDVRP). To address this problem, the insertion algorithm is used to determine a feasible solution as an initial solution for tabu search. Then, a tabu method is implemented iteratively and the best solution during the whole procedure is returned. For the flight schedule, we can consider this problem as the Resource-constraint Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP), with the objective of minimizing the project completion time. The genetic algorithm in conjunction with a simulation as the fitness function is used to optimize the flight schedule. In this paper, we compare different aircraft routing methods under different distributions of demand. Through numerical experiments, the proposed model has better rescue efficiency in comparison with the common rescue method when the distribution of demand is imbalance.