A Generic Approach to Analyze the Impact of a Future Aircraft Design on the Boarding Process

Abstract

Abstract:The turnaround process constitutes an important part of the air transportation system. Airports often represent bottlenecks in air traffic management (ATM), thus operations related to the preparation of the aircraft for the next flight leg have to be executed smoothly and in a timely manner. The ATM significantly depends on a reliable turnaround process. Future paradigm changes with respect to airplane energy sources, aircraft design or propulsion concepts will also influence the airport layout. As a consequence, operational processes associated with the turnaround will be affected. Airlines aim for efficient and timely turnaround operations that are correlated with higher profits. This case study discusses an approach to investigate a new aircraft design with respect to the implications on the turnaround. The boarding process, as part of the turnaround, serves as an example to evaluate the consequences of new design concepts. This study is part of an interdisciplinary research to investigate future energy, propulsion and designs concepts and their implications on the whole ATM system. Due to these new concepts, several processes of the turnaround will be affected. For example, new energy storage concepts will influence the fueling process on the aircraft itself or might lead to a new infrastructure at the airport. This paper aims to evaluate the applied methodology in the case of a new boarding process, due to a new aircraft design, by means of a generic example. An agent-based boarding simulation is applied to assess passenger behavior during boarding, particularly with regard to cabin layout and seat configuration. The results of the generic boarding simulation are integrated into a simplified, deterministic and generic simulation of the turnaround process. This was done to assess the proposed framework for future investigations which on the one hand address the ATM system holistically and on the other, incorporate additional or adapted processes of the turnaround.

Approach for CO2 Emission Related Cost Functions in the Context of Trade-Off Investigations of a Future Energy Efficient European Aviation

“…Especially on the ground, substantial changes in the involved processes are to be expected. An overview of the possible new aircraft configurations can be found in [3], where exemplary implications on the boarding process are investigated for the case of a blended wing body. The expected reduced ranges of electrically operated aircraft might lead to a different structure of the transport flow within the European Air Traffic System (ATS).…”

“…With regard to similar results between the particular aircraft types, the aircraft types in those chapters will be limited to nine. With respect to the flow optimization problem, we deem 9 different types 3 , which represent the most relevant aircraft in the European air traffic system as sufficient. According to Eurocontrol [21], these aircraft types represent the most used ones.…”

Sukhoi SU-47 Berkut and Eurofighter Typhoon Models Flow Visualization and Performance Investigation Using GAMA Water Tunnel

“…Jiao has reported the cost-effectiveness of lowering permissible noise levels around US airports (Jiao, Zafari, Will, Ruggeri, & Li, 2017). Foster has learned a generic approach to analyze the impact of a future aircraft design on the boarding process (Id, Förster, & Id, 2018). Cezary et al have proposed electric propulsion concepts for an inverted joined wing airplane demonstrator (Cezary Galinski, Lis, & Hajduk, 2017).…”

Investigating the Random Seat Boarding Method without Seat Assignments with Common Boarding Practices Using an Agent-Based Modeling

“…Among the elements contributing to the turnaround time, the boarding procedure plays an important role as its Eurocontrol report (2018) showed that the departure turnaround delays, due to airline and airport causes, were as much as 38% of the total delay time encountered within each flight, which demand a higher attention to sustainable improvement of the turnaround efficiency [3]. Among the elements contributing to the turnaround time, the boarding procedure plays an important role as its efficiency has a direct impact on reducing the passengers boarding time [5,6]. determined that the overall passenger boarding time takes longer than refueling and restocking, while both activities are part of the turnaround time and could be conducted in parallel with the boarding procedure [7].…”