Airplane boarding strategies using agent-based modeling and grey analysis

Abstract

The cost pressure is still one of the main concerns of the airline companies, and one of the possible means to reduce these costs can be done my minimizing the turn time of their fleet. Three processes are included in the turn time: the deplanation process, aircraft cleaning and passenger boarding. Among these, the passenger boarding is the part that takes the longest time and therefore is the most important one when reducing the turn time and its associated cost. Trying to minimize the time needed by the boarding procedure, a series of boarding techniques have been developed. As no complete agreement has been made in the literature over the best boarding technique, the present paper considers some of the most used techniques and simulates them on an A320 aircraft. To this extent, a NetLogo program is created and several situations are considered. Some of them, such as, whether the passengers are traveling with no luggage or with hand luggage are often considered in the literature. Besides them, a third case in which the passengers are delaying other passengers due to the fact that they are loading their luggage is implemented as we believe is closer to the reality. Different passengers loading are also considered ranging between 60%–100% aircraft occupancy in order to determine the boarding time. Starting from the determined durations, the grey incidence is used in order to determine the main factors influencing the airplane passengers boarding time, which could allow each company to decide the most appropriate boarding method.