The Impact of Aircraft Cabin Environment on Passenger Boarding Efficiency and Robustness

Abstract

The foldable and the side-slip seats are designed to facilitate the aircraft boarding process by providing wider spaces. Yet, these futuristic concepts have not been investigated exhaustively concerning boarding time performance and the sensitivity of various factors. Thus, we test the effectiveness of such two new concept seats by using a cellular automaton (CA) based aircraft boarding model. Simulation results confirm the potentials of improving efficiency by using the two innovative seats, and of which the foldable seat prevails over the side-slip seat in boarding time. About 12.7% and 30% time reduction could be achieved for the side-slip seat and the foldable seat by taking the conventional seat performance as a baseline, and this value could be further increased by using some other refined boarding strategies. Moreover, the foldable seat exhibits much robustness to the variation of the boarding conditions than the side-slip seat and thus could provide a much reliable boarding environment.