Robust Optimization of Airplane Passenger Seating Assignments

R Milne,Lina Kattan,Mostafa Salari

doi:10.3390/aerospace5030080

R Milne, Lina Kattan + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/aerospace5030080

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Journal: Aerospace	Publication Date: Aug 1, 2018
Citations: 24	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Calgary, Clarkson University

Abstract

We present a method that reduces the time it takes to complete the passenger boarding of an airplane. In particular, we describe a two-stage mixed integer programming (MIP) approach, which assigns passengers to seats on an airplane based on the number of bags they carry aboard the plane. The first stage is an MIP that assigns passengers to seats to minimize the time to complete the boarding of the plane. The second-stage MIP also determines seating assignments, while constraining the total boarding time to that determined by the stage-one MIP and maximizing weighted slack times to provide a more robust assignment. Numerical results show that this two-stage approach results in lower average boarding times than the one-stage approach, when the time it takes passengers to walk and sit in their seats is random. Experiments indicate that the magnitude of the improvement is not very sensitive to variations in the slack time weights.

Highlights

Delays in airplane takeoffs cost $29 billion annually [1]
Van den Briel et al [12] shows that it is effective to board the passengers who will be sitting in window seats before the passengers who will sit in middle seats and to board the passengers who will sit in aisle seats last
Numerical results indicate that the two-stage approach is superior and not especially sensitive to variations in the objective function coefficients used to weight the slack times

Summary

Introduction

Delays in airplane takeoffs cost $29 billion annually [1]. Van den Briel et al [12] shows that it is effective to board the passengers who will be sitting in window seats before the passengers who will sit in middle seats and to board the passengers who will sit in aisle seats last. This approach eliminates delays caused by seated passengers leaving their seats to make room for other passengers to sit down. A number of researchers have recently used stochastic simulation [15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22] and field tests [23,24,25,26,27] to compare the performance of boarding strategies

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