Solving the aerial fleet refueling problem using group theoretic tabu search

The aerial fleet refueling problem (AFRP) is concerned with the efficient and effective use of a heterogeneous set of tanker (refueling) aircraft, located at diverse geographical locations, in the required operations associated with the deployment of a diverse fleet of military aircraft to a foreign theater of activity. Typically, the “receiving” aircraft must traverse great distances over large bodies of water and/or over other inhospitable environs where no ground based refueling resources exist. Lacking the ability to complete their flights without refueling, each receiving aircraft must be serviced one or more times during their deployment flights by means of in-flight refueling provided by one of the available tanker aircraft. The receiving aircraft, aggregated into receiver groups (RGs) that fly together, have stipulated departure and destination bases and each RGʹs arrival time is bounded by a stated desired earliest and latest time. The excellence of a suggested solution to this very challenging decision making problem is measured relative to a rigorously defined hierarchical multicriteria objective function. aper describes how the AFRP for the Air Mobility Command (AMC), Scott Air Force Base, IL, is efficiently solved using group theoretic tabu search (GTTS). GTTS uses the symmetric group on n letters (Sn) and applies it to this problem using the Java™ language.