Methods for Accelerating the Airplane Boarding Process in the Presence of Apron Buses

Abstract

The use of apron buses for transporting passengers from the airport terminal to the airplane has become common practice for a series of airports worldwide. Airline companies have become increasingly aware of this practice and have added information to their boarding passes to suggest the airplane door passengers should use while boarding the airplane. In contrast, many of the literature's methods to reduce boarding time assume the presence of a jet-bridge connecting the airplane to the terminal. These boarding methods are ''by seat'' and ''by group'' methods. The use of the apron buses for passengers' transport limits the usage of these methods because, in most cases now, only two apron buses are needed for transporting the passengers. With two apron buses, boarding control is limited to deciding on which passengers to assign to each of the two buses. We propose 15 new methods that we tested against the previously published Back-to-front method adapted for the apron buses case, by considering 7 luggage situations. An agent-based model in NetLogo is created based on field trials and considerations made in the literature, and we used this model for simulations. Experimental results show that the best performing proposed methods combine aspects of the WilMA and Reverse Pyramid boarding methods adapted for apron buses. The best proposed method can reduce boarding time by up to 39.2% when compared to the benchmark Back-to-front method.INDEX TERMS Airplane boarding, apron buses, agent-based modeling, two-door boarding, boarding strategies, NetLogo.

Airplane Boarding Method for Passenger Groups When Using Apron Buses

“…The turtle agents receive the characteristics presented in Table 6. These characteristics and their range/value are the same as the one assumed in Delcea et al [5] for the case of airplane boarding in the presence of two apron buses when no group has been considered. The only new characteristic is the ''group-index'' variable, which can take any value greater or equal to one.…”

“…When equal to one, the model acts as in the case in which no group is considered and the boarding results are similar to the case in which each passenger boards individually. As before, the tick, namely the time unit in NetLogo, corresponds to 1.2 seconds [5].…”

“…For the patches, the characteristics in Table 5 have been considered [5], each patch having a size equivalent to 0.4 meters x 0.4 meters as suggested by [26], [61]. The turtle agents receive the characteristics presented in Table 6.…”

“…In our simulation experiments, passengers are assigned to airplane seats so that they sit as close to each other as possible-similar to what is likely to happen in real life. Our proposed method uses mixed integer programming to assign each passenger to an apron bus to achieve assignments similar to the targets established by the best performing airplane boarding method for the apron buses case, namely Mixed-WilMA-RP-C [5]. Unlike the prior works, with our proposed method, each group of passengers is assigned to a single bus.…”

Investigating the Exits’ Symmetry Impact on the Evacuation Process of Classrooms and Lecture Halls: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach

“…Throughout the time, these properties have been studied more in depth and it has been stated that instead of "rationality", it is more appropriate to use a "bounded-rationality" property. According to Getchell, this change refers to the similarity between agents and humans, with the specification that agents should be able to behave more "humanly" and not specifically more "rational" [91][92][93][94]. Following the same idea, Wilensky and Rand [89] underlined that decisions with non-optimal characteristic are the ones closer to the reality.…”