Analytical approach to solve the problem of aircraft passenger boarding during the coronavirus pandemic

Michael Schultz; Majid Soolaki

doi:10.1016/j.trc.2020.102931

Analytical approach to solve the problem of aircraft passenger boarding during the coronavirus pandemic

Transp Res Part C Emerg Technol. 2021 Mar:124:102931. doi: 10.1016/j.trc.2020.102931. Epub 2021 Jan 1.

Authors

Michael Schultz¹, Majid Soolaki²

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Logistics and Aviation, Dresden University of Technology, Germany.
² School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, University College Dublin, Ireland.

Abstract

The corona pandemic significantly changes the processes of aircraft and passenger handling at the airport. In our contribution, we focus on the time-critical process of aircraft boarding, where regulations regarding physical distances between passengers will significantly increase boarding time. The passenger behavior is implemented in a field-validated stochastic cellular automata model, which is extended by a module to evaluate the transmission risk. We propose an improved boarding process by considering that most of the passengers are travel together and should be boarded and seated as a group. The NP-hard seat allocation of groups with minimized individual interactions between groups is solved with a genetic algorithm. Then, the improved seat allocation is used to derive an associated boarding sequence aiming at both short boarding times and low risk of virus transmission. Our results show that the consideration of groups will significantly contribute to a faster boarding (reduction of time by about 60%) and less transmission risk (reduced by 85%) compared to the standard random boarding procedures applied in the pandemic scenario.

Keywords: Aircraft boarding; COVID19; Cabin operations; Genetic algorithm; Optimization model; Pandemic requirements; Passenger groups; Virus transmission.