In the effort to combat climate change, the CO2 emissions of the aviation sector must be reduced. The traffic caused by numerous types of ground vehicles on airport aprons currently contributes to those emissions as the vehicles typically operate with combustion engines, which is why an electrification of those vehicles has already begun. While stationary conductive charging of the vehicles is the current standard technology, dynamic wireless charging might be an attractive technological alternative, in particular for airport aprons; however, designing a charging network for an airport apron is a challenging task with important technical and economic aspects. In this paper, we propose a model to characterize the problem, especially for cases of multiple types of vehicles sharing the same charging network, such as passenger buses and baggage vehicles. In a numerical study inspired by real-world airports, we design such charging networks subject to service level constraints and evaluate the resulting structures via a discrete-event simulation, and thus, show the way to assess the margin of safety with respect to the vehicle batteries’ state of charge that is induced by the spatial structure of the charging network.

Dynamic inductive charging is a contact-free technology to provide electric vehicles with energy while they are in motion, thus eliminating the need to conductively charge the batteries of those vehicles and, hence, the required vehicle downtimes. Airport aprons of commercial airports are potential systems to employ this charging technology to reduce aviation-induced CO2 emissions. To date, many vehicles operating on airport aprons are equipped with internal combustion engines burning diesel fuel, hence contributing to CO2 emissions and the global warming problem. However, airport aprons exhibit specific features that might make dynamic inductive charging technologies particularly interesting. It turns out that using this technology leads to some strategic infrastructure design questions for airport aprons about the spatial allocation of the required system components. In this paper, we experimentally analyze these design questions to explore under which conditions we can expect the resulting mathematical optimization problems to be relatively hard or easy to be solved, respectively, as well as the achievable solution quality. To this end, we report numerical results on a large-scale numerical study reflecting different types of spatial structures of terminals and airport aprons as they can be found at real-world airports.