Abstract

With the recent increase of air traffic, major airports become more and more congested: sensible delays may be caused by ground operations, and problems related to the efficiency and the safety of the apron area assume more and more importance. In this paper, we consider the problem of determining an efficient allocation of ground service equipment and staff to aircraft standing on the apron, as emerged in the framework of the European sponsored project “Integrated Airport Apron Safety Fleet Management – AAS”. After providing a mathematical formulation for the problem, we suggest a fast sequential heuristic to be integrated in the real time dispatching decision support systems normally adopted in modern airports. The procedure has been applied in the AAS context, showing to be able to improve efficiency of handling operations.

Abstract

One of the effects of the development of air traffic during recent years is the increase of congestion on major airports and their aprons, where ground handling operations take place. Efficiency and safety issues become important on the aprons. The “Integrated Airport Apron Safety Fleet Management – AAS” project aims at setting a decision support system for an efficient and safe management of apron traffic, taking advantage of information gathered by “intelligent” vehicles equipped with on-board positioning and monitoring systems. In this project, we optimize the assignment of vehicles to apron operations. We present a mathematical formulation of the problem and sketch a fast sequential heuristic, which provides efficient assignments based on real-time data on position and status of vehicles and operations. We then discuss how the procedure can reach good trade-offs between efficiency and robustness against unpredicted, but frequent, delays occurring in real-time at airports. The proposed approach has been applied to a major European airport (Berlin’s Tegel), leading to efficiency improvements and reduction of expected delays due to handling operations.