Feeder routing for air-to-air refueling operations

With the ever increasing volume of air traffic comes an enormous environmental impact, specifically due to carbon emissions. A promising approach to reduce this impact is the introduction of en route air-to-air refueling, allowing for the design of aircraft with reduced weight and a decreased fuel burn. Aside from the design of aircraft, the key challenge lies in the planning of the refueling operation in order to minimize the fuel burn of the feeder fleet. The air-to-air refueling problem is a variant of a vehicle routing problem in which a fleet of feeders are to perform air-to-air refueling operations for a fixed set of cruisers. In this paper, we devise an IP-based method capable of solving this problem supported by an ODE model of the feeders’ fuel consumption. The algorithmic key to solve the air-to-air refueling problem lies in separating the problem of finding routes serving cruisers and assigning sets of routes to individual feeders. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods both on real-world and artificial instances, solving all problems to optimality and significantly outperforming state-of-the-art heuristic methods.