An analytical optimisation framework for airport terminal capacity expansion

Abstract

This article considers how to allocate additional physical resources within airport terminals. An optimization model was developed to determine where additional resources should be placed to minimise passenger waiting times. The objective function is stochastic and can only be evaluated using discrete event simulation. As this model is stochastic and nonlinear, a Simulated Annealing (SA) metaheuristic was implemented and tested. The SA algorithm repeatedly perturbs a resource allocation solution using one of two methods. The first method is creating new solution randomly in each iteration, and the second method is local search that is mimicked by any move of the current solution of x solution chosen randomly in its neighborhood. Numerical testing shows that the random approach is best, and solutions that are 12.11% better can be obtained.