A mathematical model for tactical aerial search and rescue fleet and operation planning

Public safety in air and ocean transportation is the utmost important consideration for national and international transportation authorities. When accidents occur, however, it normally requires joint civil and military efforts to perform search and rescue operations to locate the geographic locations of the disaster in searching for lives, the aircraft or the vessel in question. This research considers the problem for planning an ad hoc fleet for doing searching missions in high seas as a resource allocation problem and proposes variations in the objective function of a binary integer programming model in response to diverse aspects of an aerial SAR operation, such as available information about targets, elapsed time from the declared emergency, as well as the type of the operation, real or simulated. A numerical example based in practical considerations including available airports, heterogeneous fleet, aircraft and crew availability is used to test and illustrate the developed model. The results show that an air search operation may be optimized according to different priorities related to area to be covered, time flown and costs for flying and supporting the operation.