Aircraft turnaround operations involve all services to an aircraft (e.g. passenger boarding/disembarking, re-fuelling, deicing) between its arrival and immediately following departure. The aircraft, parked at its stand, witnesses a number of service providers move around it to perform their duties. These companies run substantially independent operations, working for different airlines/flights within a confined area where many resources, including physical space itself, have inescapably to be shared. Inter-dependencies among service providers abound, and knock-on effects at disrupted times are rife. Coordination from the side of the airport operator is difficult. We envisage a tactical robust scheme whereby ground handlers and the airport operator cooperate, albeit indirectly, in the development of plans for the next day that are less likely to be impacted by at least the more frequent operational disruptions. The scheme is based on a simheuristic approach which integrates ad-hoc heuristics with a hybrid simulation model (agent-based/discrete-event). MOTIVATIONDemand for commercial air transport continues to grow. Passenger volume grew globally 7.1% in 2016 and is expected to more than double by 2035 (IATA 2017), which will require a strong infrastructure and operational efficiency. Additionally, there is a push to move to aircraft 4D trajectory in the US NextGen and Single European Sky initiatives, in which aircraft movement would no longer be restricted to the current node to node concept, but could exist in any xyz space coordinate at any time. This would increase the capacity of aircraft in the airspace (Schultz 2018) tremendously, adding to the need to optimize ground operational efficiency for the turnaround of aircraft in between ever more frequent flights.Ground handling consists of all of the processes that occur between the time that the aircraft reaches the allocated 'block' at the airport (i.e. its parking stand/position) and the time at which the aircraft departs for its next flight. This has been deemed the second most common reason for delays to flights (Van Leeuwen and Witteveen 2009), which means that ground handling service providers (SPs) are in need of support to

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Scheduling aircraft turnarounds at airports requires the coordination of several organizations, including the airport operator, airlines, and ground service providers. The latter manage the necessary supplies and teams to handle aircraft in between consecutive flights, in an area called the airport ‘apron’. Divergence and conflicting priorities across organizational borders negatively impact the smooth running of operations, and play a major role in departure delays. We provide a novel simulation-optimization approach that allows multiple service providers to build robust plans for their teams independently, whilst supporting overall coordination through central scheduling of all the involved turnaround activities. Simulation is integrated within the optimization process, following simheuristic techniques, which are augmented with an efficient search driving mechanism. Two tailored constraint-based feedback routines are automatically generated from simulation outputs to constrain the search space to solutions more likely to ensure plan robustness. The two simulation components provide constructive feedback on individual routing problems and global turnaround scheduling, respectively. Compared to the state-of-the-art approach for aircraft turnaround scheduling and routing of service teams, our methodology improves the apron’s on-time punctuality, without the need for the involved organizations to share sensitive information. This supports a wider applicability of our approach in a multiple-stakeholder environment.

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