Abstract
This paper designs the timetable for the airport coach which is a new access service provided by the airport with the purpose of attracting more passengers. Firstly, the ‘time–space’ network is constructed for analyzing the formation of the passengers’ trip chain; Secondly, the timetable design model is built with the aim to minimize the unit operation cost per transported passenger of the airport coach and a genetic algorithm with matrix coding is used for solving the model. In the model, the coach departure time and the flight schedule are connected with each other; the quality of the coach service and the passenger’s demand are both considered. Finally, the coach of Dalian airport in China is taken as an example to test the proposed method. Through solving the model and sensitivity analysis, we obtain a coach timetable for Dalian airport. The results show that the proposed model can provide a practical method to design the timetable for the airport coaches with ‘hub-and-spoke’ network.
Highlights
In 2009, the total turnover of China civil aviation reached 42.71 billion ton-kilometres, the passenger volume reached 4.9 billion persons, the cargo and mail volume reached 9.45 million tons, which was respectively 1.5, 4 and 3.7 times of those in 2002
The ‘time–space’ network is constructed for analyzing the formation of the passengers’ trip chain; Secondly, the timetable design model is built with the aim to minimize the unit operation cost per transported passenger of the airport coach and a genetic algorithm with matrix coding is used for solving the model
This paper provides a method to design the timetable of the airport coach with the ‘hub-and-spoke’ network
Summary
In 2009, the total turnover of China civil aviation reached 42.71 billion ton-kilometres, the passenger volume reached 4.9 billion persons, the cargo and mail volume reached 9.45 million tons, which was respectively 1.5, 4 and 3.7 times of those in 2002. The results show that the timetable design in the ‘hub-and-spoke’ network should consider the operation cost, the routes and passengers’ demand. Based on the methods of designing the flight schedule and designing bus timetable, this paper introduces the timetable designing method of the ‘hub-and-spoke’ network into research and pays more attention to the passengers’ demand of the airport coach, to design the most appropriate timetable for the airport coach which is a special travel mode with a lot of characteristics. The first row means the route (1–3) is a branch one, and a coach will depart to node 3 at 4:00, 6:00, 11:00, and 20:00 respectively
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