Comparative Study of Aircraft Boarding Strategies Using Cellular Discrete Event Simulation

Jafer, Shafagh; Mi, Wei

doi:10.3390/aerospace4040057

Cited by 28 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…We summarize only these methods because they contain the core ideas that are used in the methods that apply when apron buses are used. Additional methods and their boarding rules can be found in References [14,15,21,25,30,31,33]. Table 1.…”

Section: Summary Of One-door Boarding Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A middle seat is the most "highly disliked" choice. For better simulation of the considered situations, an agent-based model in NetLogo [10] was created and calibrated in accordance with the on-the-field observations made throughout the literature [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. The BehaviourSpace tool offered by NetLogo has been used for simulations [19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Testing New Methods for Boarding a Partially Occupied Airplane Using Apron Buses

et al. 2019

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The use of apron buses has become a common practice at many European airports. Previous studies related to airplane boarding rarely apply when apron buses are used, leaving airlines with no well-researched option except to use the random boarding method. In this paper, we test the time to complete boarding a two-door airplane using various boarding methods with two apron buses. These methods were inspired by the classical outside-in, back-to-front, and reverse-pyramid methods considering the limited number of boarding groups corresponding to the limited number of apron buses used for transporting passengers from the terminal to the aircraft. Unlike earlier publications, we test these methods under partial aircraft occupancy. Furthermore, we test the boarding methods under conditions involving: different passenger occupancy rates, different luggage situations, and with two types of seating assignments-random and based upon passenger seating preferences-by considering the advantages brought by the symmetric layout of the aircraft. Experimental results indicate that the best performing method can reduce the boarding time by up to 38.6% compared to the time resulting from the random boarding method. When the airplane is partially occupied, the best performing methods are reverse pyramid-A, hybrid-A, and hybrid-B, all with similar performances.

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Section: Summary Of One-door Boarding Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing New Methods for Boarding a Partially Occupied Airplane Using Apron Buses

et al. 2019

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“…Over time, a series of papers have been written in the area of airplane passengers' boarding, either on proposing new boarding methods, making adjustments to the already existing methods, or determining which method perform better under given conditions (number of seat rows or aircraft type description [10,[14][15][16][17], passengers movement [5,13], passengers carrying hand luggage [10,12,13,18,19], seat selection [5,15], aircraft occupancy [8,10,14,18,[20][21][22], annual cost [23], seat and aisle interference [24], etc.) As for the methods used in modeling and simulation, one can mention the following approaches: cellular Discrete-Event System Specification (Cell-DEVS) modeling [25], Discrete-Event simulation [21], cellular automata [26], stochastic approach [27][28][29], linear programming [30], grid based simulation model [31], computer simulation [20,21,30,32,33], Cell-based computer simulation [15], Markov Chain Monte Carlo optimization algorithm and computer simulation [13], genetic algorithm [16], critical path method and Lorentzian space-time geometry [6], and empirical tests of the performance of the considered boarding methods…”

Section: Non-traditional Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Each tick from NetLogo, representing the unit of time, has been associated with 3.7 s in real life as recent researches suggested [27,47]. This value has been updated from 5.4 s as suggested by [10,25,48] to 3.7 s determined by field measurement in [47]. Moreover, for the current modeling, the seat interference has been considered, which will cause delay in the overall boarding time, depending on the passenger's seats and whether their neighboring seats are occupied.…”

Section: Methodology and Model's Parametersmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Two-Door Airplane Boarding Approach When Using Apron Buses

et al. 2018

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Boarding is one of the major processes of airplane turnaround time, with a direct influence on the airline companies’ costs. From a sustainable point of view, a faster completion of the boarding process has impact not only on the airline company’s long-term performance, but also on customers’ satisfaction and on the airport’s possibility of offering more services without additional investments in new infrastructure. Considering the airplane boarding strategies literature, it can be observed that the latest papers are dealing with developing faster boarding strategies, most of them considering boarding using just one-door of the aircraft. Even though boarding on one-door might be feasible for the airports having the needed infrastructure and sufficient jet-bridges, the situation is different in European airports, as the use of apron buses is fairly common. Moreover, some of the airline companies have adapted their boarding pass in order to reflect which door one should board once they get down from the bus. While using these buses, the boarding strategies developed in the literature are hard to find their applicability. Thus, a new method for boarding on two-door airplanes when apron buses are used is proposed and tested against the actual boarding method. A model is created in NetLogo 6.0.4, taking advantages of the agent-based modeling and used for simulations. The results show a boarding time reduction of 8.91%.

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“…For example, JetBlue uses a "by seat" modified reverse pyramid on the half zone for passengers boarding, while KLM, on selected flights, has used a method that combines WilMA and Back-to-front in a "by seat" manner [12]. Additional methods, "by seat" or "by group", and their boarding rules can be found in [4,8,[21][22][23][24][25].…”

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confidence: 99%

Greedy Method for Boarding a Partially Occupied Airplane Using Apron Buses

et al. 2019

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This paper investigates the time to complete the boarding of a partially occupied two-door airplane when its passengers are transported from the airport terminal to the airplane using two apron buses. We propose a greedy method that assigns each passenger to a particular apron bus based on the passengers’ airplane seat assignments. This greedy approach exploits the airplane’s symmetry by providing essentially the same method for those boarding through the front door of the airplane as those boarding through the rear door of the airplane. The symmetrical properties of window, middle, and aisle seats of each row/side are considered in the proposed method as well. Computer simulation results indicate that, when using the greedy method, the boarding time can be reduced by up to 8.33% compared to the boarding time resulting from the best known practices in the literature, and with up to a 43.72% improvement in boarding time when compared to the boarding method commonly used in many airports. Furthermore, experimental results confirm our hypothesis that when the capacity of the apron buses exceeds the number of passengers to be transported to the airplane, the most time-efficient results of the proposed greedy method occur when an equal number of passengers are assigned to each of the two apron buses.

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Comparative Study of Aircraft Boarding Strategies Using Cellular Discrete Event Simulation

Cited by 28 publications

References 13 publications

Testing New Methods for Boarding a Partially Occupied Airplane Using Apron Buses

Testing New Methods for Boarding a Partially Occupied Airplane Using Apron Buses

A Two-Door Airplane Boarding Approach When Using Apron Buses

Greedy Method for Boarding a Partially Occupied Airplane Using Apron Buses

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