An agent-based simulator for airport ground handling services

Abstract

Airport ground handling plays an essential role in shortening the turnaround time for better utilization of aircraft that can reduce the cost per flight. One of the key challenges for improving the efficiency of airport ground operations is to comprehensively simulate the ground handling processes to optimize and evaluate various operation strategies. In this work, we develop an agent-based simulator that specifically focuses on the whole process of airport ground handling from landing to takeoff. It allows different types of agents, i.e. aircraft, ground vehicles, operators, and dispatchers, to execute their own behaviors according to the ground operation characteristics. The interactions among different agents are also modeled according to the specific service agreements. We use the Shanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG) for the case study to demonstrate the interfaces and outputs of the simulator including the simulated flight information, the progress of ground handling services, airfield status, etc. With the developed simulator, we could not only reproduce the real-world operations of different types of services but also have enough potential to optimize and evaluate various airport ground operation strategies under a series of complex scenarios.