Airport passenger platform logistics optimisation for remote aircraft stand operations

Abstract

Since the commercialisation of air travel, demand for air transport is increasing. Optimal system capacity utilisation at airports has therefore become crucial. As available resources such as land, buildings and human are scarce and airline tickets need to be financially affordable, airports optimise their system while maximising capacity within the constraints of safety and reliability. Regional airports, that often provide remote stands which are not connected to the terminal building, need to obey to and cope with an incremental number of operational planning rules in order to provide safe and secure apron operations. Current operational apron planning procedures imply a remote stand allocation that results in a corresponding gate assignment and a passenger apron transfer including a mode choice between pedestrian and bus transport. This study will add to research by fundamentally changing this approach into an integrated optimisation procedure. This entails simultaneously optimising the remote stand allocation, gate assignment and apron passenger transfer by means of an integrated mixed integer linear programming model. The model objective is to minimise the total apron transfer duration and therefore apron utilisation time. Experiments on a Rotterdam The Hague Airport case study show that the integrated optimisation procedure provides the potential of an average apron passenger time saving of 18% given the optimised stand-gate-route allocations. As a result of remaining model limitations, this research leaves the opportunity for the integration of apron aircraft movements to include the impact of jet blast. Furthermore, the potential of a rolling horizon approach could be researched to include system uncertainty over time and the potential to update the operational planning.