Offshore Helicopter Routing in a Hub and Spoke Fashion: Minimizing Expected Number of Fatalities

Abstract Helicopters are often used for transportation of workers to and from offshore installations. Flying helicopter is a risky business and is often considered as one of the main risk factors in this industry. The present paper is dealing with different routing policies for minimizing the expected number of fatalities where the transportation is performed in a hub and spoke fashion from a land based heliport to a set of offshore installations either using the heliport as a hub or using one or more offshore installations as hubs. Some theoretical results are offered as well as an exact model when one operates with more than one offshore hub.