New methods for two-door airplane boarding using apron buses

Abstract

Apron buses are widely employed by European airlines to transfer passengers from airport terminals to airplanes. However, the vast majority of current boarding methods are designed for use with jet-bridges and one-door boarding of airplanes and thus are not well suited for apron buses and passengers boarding simultaneously through both a front door and a back door of an airplane. This study describes and tests 13 new boarding methods that assign each passenger to one of two apron buses—based on the passenger's seat on the airplane. Our simulation platform, developed in NetLogo, investigates the time to complete boarding of the airplane for the boarding methods for varying amounts of luggage carried aboard the plane. The results indicate that the new boarding methods could decrease the boarding time by 5.6%–36.6% compared to the best method previously published in the literature for this context of two apron buses and two-door boarding of airplanes.