Airplane boarding, disk scheduling, and lorentzian geometry

Abstract

We provide a detailed analysis of the airplane boarding process and evaluate various boarding policies using Lorentzian geometry. We also analyze several related problems such as I/O disk scheduling. Boarding policies which we analyze include, random, back-to-front, outside-in, no overhead bin luggage first among others. We also show that the motion of the earth around the sun may be viewed as being uniformly random.