Methods for Accelerating the Airplane Boarding Process in the Presence of Apron Buses

Abstract

The use of apron buses for transporting passengers from the airport terminal to the airplane has become common practice for a series of airports worldwide. Airline companies have become increasingly aware of this practice and have added information to their boarding passes to suggest the airplane door passengers should use while boarding the airplane. In contrast, many of the literature's methods to reduce boarding time assume the presence of a jet-bridge connecting the airplane to the terminal. These boarding methods are “by seat” and “by group” methods. The use of the apron buses for passengers' transport limits the usage of these methods because, in most cases now, only two apron buses are needed for transporting the passengers. With two apron buses, boarding control is limited to deciding on which passengers to assign to each of the two buses. We propose 15 new methods that we tested against the previously published Back-to-front method adapted for the apron buses case, by considering 7 luggage situations. An agent-based model in NetLogo is created based on field trials and considerations made in the literature, and we used this model for simulations. Experimental results show that the best performing proposed methods combine aspects of the WilMA and Reverse Pyramid boarding methods adapted for apron buses. The best proposed method can reduce boarding time by up to 39.2% when compared to the benchmark Back-to-front method.

Keywords

• Airplane boarding
• apron buses
• agent-based modeling
• two-door boarding
• boarding strategies
• NetLogo