Review on passenger boarding process optimization at civil airports

ABSTRACT

On the basis of the recent research on the optimization of passenger boarding process at civil airports, the research status and achievements in this area was analyzed from the aspects of passenger, aircraft, methodology, and COVID-19 pandemic, the methods and measures to optimize the passenger boarding process at civil airports were discussed, and the directions of future studies were explored according to the deficiency in current research. Research results show that in the passenger-oriented optimization studies, the group passengers are considered a significant factor. The minimum boarding time and boarding interference are used as the objective functions to build relevant models, and the passengers with different priorities and latecomers are often considered in groups. WilMA and RP are two boarding strategies with excellent comprehensive performance, and the new Side-Slip seat has the most significant influence on boarding time. The solution of passenger boarding optimization include model methods and simulation methods, in which models mainly include statistical physical model and mathematical model, and simulations include cellular automata and agents. In terms of the COVID-19 pandemic-oriented boarding studies, the health of passengers is the main consideration, where boarding time and health risks are the two primary indicators to evaluate the quality of passenger boarding. In future studies, the advantages of different boarding strategies should be combined to overcome the shortcomings of different individual strategies. The agent-based simulation with strong independence should be combined with the cellular automata simulation that does not highlight the individual heterogeneity. More factors should be considered in optimization models, and better heuristic algorithms should be explored to solve optimization models. Moreover, the impacts of the factors such as the safe social distance, the number of passengers wearing masks, and the number of group boarding passengers on the process of boarding should be attached more importance. It is also an important research direction to explore how to maximize passenger safety and boarding efficiency under the regular COVID-19 epidemic control. 11 tabs, 4 figs, 142 refs. © 2022 Chang'an University. All rights reserved.