Scheduling Strategy for Specialized Vehicles Based on Digital Twin in Airport

Abstract

Flight schedule fluctuations are very common in many airports, which means the arrival of flights tend to be different from the plan. It has caused huge challenges for airports to real-time schedule the specialized vehicles to finish the ground-service operations. However, the existing scheduling methods, such as optimization algorithms and off-line simulations, rarely utilize the real-time information and could not adjust the specialized vehicles dispatching according to the flight schedule fluctuations. As a result, precise operation control for specialized vehicles couldn’t be achieved. Therefore, this paper proposes a real-time scheduling strategy for specialized vehicles based on digital-twin, which is constructed by cloud-and-edge computing architecture. This method uses real-time arrival of flights and the current status of vehicles to generate and adjust the schedules of specialized vehicles. In this method, specialized vehicle priority and flight one are taken into account, and both of them are calculated based on the real-time information in the digital twin model. A number of experiments were processed and experimental results show that the proposed method have a better performance in shortening ground-service duration of three kinds of flights and improving the number of flights departed on time.