Minimizing Airplane Boarding Time

作     者：Willamowski, Felix J. L. Tillmann, Andreas M. 

作者机构：Rhein Westfal TH Aachen Lehrstuhl Operat Res D-52072 Aachen Germany Tech Univ Carolo Wilhelmina Braunschweig Cluster Excellence Sustainable & Energy Efficient D-38106 Braunschweig Germany Tech Univ Carolo Wilhelmina Braunschweig Inst Math Optimizat D-38106 Braunschweig Germany 

出 版 物：《TRANSPORTATION SCIENCE》 (Transp Sci)

年 卷 期：2022年第56卷第5期

页      面：1196页

核心收录：

学科分类：1201[管理学-管理科学与工程(可授管理学、工学学位)] 08[工学] 0823[工学-交通运输工程] 

基　　金：Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy EXC 2163/1 Sustainable and Energy-Efficient Aviation 

主　　题：airplane boarding optimization complexity mixed integer programming 

摘      要：The time it takes passengers to board an airplane is known to influence the turnaround time of the aircraft and thus bears a significant cost-saving potential for airlines. Although minimizing boarding time therefore is the most important goal from an economic perspective, previous efforts to design efficient boarding strategies apparently never tackled this task directly. In this paper, we first rigorously define the problem and prove its NP-hardness. Although this generally justifies the development of inexact solution methods, we show that all commonly discussed boarding strategies may in fact give solutions that are far from optimal. We complement these theoretical findings by a simple time-aware boarding strategy with guaranteed approximation quality (under reasonable assumptions) as well as a local improvement heuristic and an exact mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulation. Our numerical experiments with simulation data show that for several airplane cabin layouts, provably high-quality or even optimal solutions can be obtained within reasonable time in practice by means of our MIP approach. We also empirically assess the sensitivity of boarding strategies with respect to disruptions of the prescribed boarding sequences and identify robustness against such disruptions as a bottleneck for further improvements.