Agent-based decision-making process in airport ground handling management

Abstract

Recent research on highly distributed control methods has produced a series of new philosophies based on negotiation, which bring together the process engineering with computer science. Among these control philosophies, the ones based on Multi-agent Systems (MAS) have become especially relevant to address complex tasks and to support distributed decision making in asset management, manufacturing, and logistics. However, these MAS models have the drawback of an excessive dependence on up-to-date field information. In this work, a theoretical and experimental MAS, called MAS-DUO, is presented to test new strategies for managing handling operations supported by feedback coming from radio frequency identification (RFID) systems. These strategies have been based on a new distributed organization model to enforce the idea of division between physical elements and information and communication technologies (ICT) in the product scheduling control. This division in two platforms simplifies the design, the development, and the validation of the MAS, allowing an abstraction and preserving the independency between platforms. The communication between both platforms is based on sharing the parameters of the Markov reward function. This function is mainly made up of the field information coming from the RFID readers incorporated as the internal beliefs of the agent. The proposed MAS have been deployed on the Ciudad Real Central Airport in Spain in order to dimension the ground handling resources.

Simulation Based Optimisation of Ground Crews: Case of a Regional Airport

“…However, the relative rigidity of DES model makes it less suitable for modelling of complex socio-technical systems. Agent based modelling (ABM) is better suited for modelling of complex systems, and is thus often used to supplement or replace DES in recent research, [12,26,27]. Combining DES and ABM allows researchers to model stable, static processes using DES, using ABM, which is more difficult to implement, only for the dynamic processes, where a DES model would be too complex or infeasible to implement [6,12,16,[25][26][27][28][29][30].…”

“…Airports processes are complex and overlapping, with frequent changes due to changes in flight schedules, making their optimization a mathematically and empirically difficult task. The handling of an aircraft from the time it arrives at the gate, to the time of the departure for the next flight, has to be performed quickly, efficiently and accurately to minimize flight delays and provide a valuable service for the airline and the passengers [12][13][14], requiring efficient ground crew management and training [15].…”

An Improved Method for Scheduling Aircraft Ground Handling Operations From a Global Perspective

“…This strategy has been supported by the Airport-Collaborative Decision Making (A-CDM) initiative (EUROCONTROL, 2012), which has shown the need for cooperation between the involved actors. The adoption of novel technology solutions such as Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) or wireless networks has also contributed to more accurate and timely information transmission (Ansola et al, 2011;Pestana et al, 2011;Makhloof et al, 2014). The second approach relies on more suitable resource planning.…”

Customer Context and Social CRM: A Literature Review and Research Agenda

“…Their complexity varies according to the number of constraints addressed. Typical scheduling problems in the airport domain are: aircraft scheduling (Bian, Burke, Jain & Kendall, 2005;El Moudani & Mora-Camino, 2000;Gurtner, Bongiorno, Ducci & Miccichè, 2016;Yan & Chen, 2008), ground crew scheduling (Clausen, 2011), disruption management (Pereira, Fadigas, Senna & Moret, 2011) (Løve, Sørensen, Larsen & Clausen, 2002), aircraft landing sequence scheduling (García Ansola, García Higuera, Pastor & Otamendi, 2011;Tavakkoli-Moghaddam, Yaghoubi-Panah & Radmehr, 2012) or personnel training scheduling (Brucker, Qu & Burke, 2011). Particularly in the domain of personnel scheduling, the most popular type of scheduling problem is the aircraft crew scheduling, while the problem of ground crew has mainly been neglected.…”