An Analysis of Robustness Approaches for the Airport Baggage Sorting Station Assignment Problem

Amadeo Ascó

doi:10.1155/2016/1213949

Abstract

In the Airport Baggage Sorting Station Assignment Problem (ABSSAP), the Baggage Sorting Stations (BSSs) are assigned to flights for the period of time necessary to perform their service for a given flights’ schedule. But the flights schedule may change on the day of operation which may deem the original assignment of some flights to BSSs infeasible. These changes may create conflicts between those flights whose schedules have changed and may not be restricted to those flights but propagating to the other flights for different reasons. Conflicts depend on the original assignments for the real arrival and departure flight times on the day of operation. It is therefore desirable to consider potential delays on the day of operation when generating the original flight assignments to BSSs, such that the final flight assignments differ little or do not differ at all from the original assignments on the day of operation. The term robustness is here used to give an indication of the degree to which this has been achieved. Some existing approaches originally presented in the Airport Gate Assignment Problem (AGAP) are adapted to the ABSSAP, other approaches are suggested for generating assignments which take account of potential perturbations on the day of operation for the ABSSAP, and all of them are then compared. It is shown that the suggested approaches by themselves do not perform better than the other considered approaches but when combined they enhance the result further compared to when each approach is used alone.

Highlights

Flight delays are caused by many factors like airport security, weather conditions, unavailability of required resources, delayed propagation, airport congestion, etc.The Airport Baggage Sorting Station Assignment Problem (ABSSAP) corresponds to the assignments of flights to Baggage Sorting Stations (BSSs), whereas the BSSs are the end elements in the baggage system at the ground of the airport terminal where the baggage is collected from and sorted by the baggage handlers or to where the baggage from arrived flights are placed to enter the baggage system
This section looks at the performance from the point of view of the robustness by measuring the number of conflicts for a given set of perturbed schedules, for all the approaches presented in Section 3: firstly when they are used alone, secondly when combined with the TRS approach, and for the combinations with the approaches which consider the flight densities
N referring to the number of BSSs available, three ranges of the number of BSSs have been defined, based on the Lower Maximum Assignment Point (LMAP) and Upper Maximum Assignment Point (UMAP), where the first is for N < LMAP, the second is for LMAP ≤ N < UMAP, and the third is for UMAP ≤ N

Summary

Introduction

Flight delays are caused by many factors like airport security, weather conditions, unavailability of required resources (mechanical breakdown), delayed propagation, airport congestion, etc. Buffer time has been used in the scheduling of BSSs and airport gates, which may be applied between two consecutive flights to the same BSS in order to absorb small disturbances in the real system behaviour and was studied in [1, 6]. It was used in the ABSSAP in [2, 3, 5, 7] where it was used in the optimization of the aircraft turnaround process. Wu and Caves [7, 14] showed the significance of a correct use of scheduled buffer time in maintaining schedule punctuality and performance by balancing the trade-offs between schedule punctuality and aircraft utilisation

Problem under Consideration

Robustness Approaches

Flight2B3 Flight3 r3

Flight schedule

Results

Conclusions