Effects of the variability in the distribution of passenger luggage on the boarding policy

Citation

Fernandez, V. Lordan, O., Sallan, J. M. (2015). Effects of the variability in the distribution of passenger luggage on the boarding policy. 2015 ATRS World Conference. National University of Singapore (Singapore).

Abstract

Boarding time is one major concern when planning turnaround times in airline planning schedule. Some researchers (e.g. Steffen, 2008; Milne and Keyy, 2014) present methods to assign seats and to board passengers on an airplane that minimizes the total time to board. Steffen (2008) presents an optimum boarding method that assigns passengers to a specific numerical position in line that depends upon their ticketed seat location. Milne and Keyy (2014) assign individual passengers to seats based on the amount of luggage they carry. Although these methods give some interesting results, there are some aspects related to the luggage that haven’t been studied. For example, Milne and Keyy (2014) consider that each bin has unlimited storage space. For this reason, we have designed and implemented a simulation engine in order to analyze how the variability in the distribution of passenger luggage affects the total time to board all passengers. Our simulation engine considers a limited storage space, and take the parameters and distributions of the row-to-row times (triangular distribution) from the study of Van Landeghem and Beuselinck (2002). Moreover, we have included in the simulations the effect of different boarding policies that we have identified in the literature with several  distributions of the passanger luggage.