Abstract
Optimally organizing passengers boarding/deboarding an airplane offers a potential way to reduce the airplane turn time. The main contribution of our work is that we evaluate seven boarding strategies and two structured deboarding strategies by using a surrogate experimental test. Instead of boarding a real or mocked airplane, we carried out the experiment by organizing 40 participants to board a school bus with ten rows of four seats, symmetrically distributed on a single, central aisle. Experimental results confirm that the optimized strategies, i.e., Steffen and Steffen-lug, are superior to the traditional ones, i.e., Back-to-front, Window-to-aisle, and Random in time-saving and stability. However, the two structured deboarding strategies failed to reduce the deboarding time, and this result strongly suggests the prerequisites of applying such strategies only when, on average, passengers have a large amount of luggage. Besides, we further carried out a questionnaire survey of participants’ preferences on seat layout and discussed how those preferences influence the boarding time.
Highlights
Airlines, under increasing competition pressure, are driven to optimize their operations by maximizing their efficiency and profitability
The main contribution of our work is that we evaluate seven boarding and three deboarding strategies by using a surrogate experimental test
Results confirm the following: (1) The most time-saving strategies are those defining an exact sequence of the passengers when boarding, i.e., Steffen, CRBF, and Steffen-lug
Summary
Under increasing competition pressure, are driven to optimize their operations by maximizing their efficiency and profitability. An example of such deviation is that passengers are basically assumed to be homogeneous in in simulations, which is too simple to describe the complex dynamic of the boarding process arising simulations, which is too simple to describe the complex dynamic of the boarding process arising from individual differences It is, important to know the real performance of some optimal from individual differences. The author found a significant reduction in boarding time with the optimized Steffen strategy over the other three traditional strategies, i.e., the block strategy, the optimized Steffen strategy over the other three traditional strategies, i.e., the block strategy, the window-to-aisle strategy, and random strategy.
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