Accurate Tracking, Collision Detection, and Optimal Scheduling of Airport Ground Support Equipment

Abstract

In order to lower the ramp risk and improve the aircraft ground handling efficiency, we aim to: 1) track ground support equipment (GSE) in a real-time and high-accuracy manner so that we can not only conveniently obtain the positions and velocities of them but also reliably report latent collisions among aircraft and GSE. As a result, corresponding ramp risks could be detected and handled in advance and 2) schedule the GSE in an optimal manner based on the real-time data gathered in advance to make efficient use of GSE so that we can smoothly serve the annually increasing air traffic while controlling the ramp area congestion and GSE overheads. In detail, first, we develop a real-time and high-accuracy tracking device consisting of one real-time kinematic (RTK) unit and heading unit(s), for GSE including not only those which have only one carriage, such as tractors, shutters, and so forth but also baggage transit trains that contain one tug plus multiple dollies. The tracking accuracy for GSE could be limited within centimeters so that the monitor, avoidance, and fixation of unaware ramp risks become possible. Second, for optimal scheduling of GSE, a mixed-integer linear programming model and an efficient heuristic algorithm are proposed to minimize the total cost of equipment’s rental and travel consumption while respecting the constraints, such as flights timetables, GSE moving speeds limit, the total number of GSE available in stock, the maximum number of dollies allowed to attach to each baggage transit train, and so on.