Robust planning of airport platform buses

G. Diepen, B. F.I. Pieters, J. M. Van Den Akker*, J. A. Hoogeveen

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Most airports have two types of gates: gates with an air bridge to the terminal and remote stands. For flights at a remote stand, passengers are transported to and from the aircraft by platform buses. In this paper we investigate the problem of planning platform buses as it appears at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. We focus on robust planning, i.e. we want to avoid that the bus planning is affected by flight delays and in this way invokes delays in other flights and ground-handling processes. We present a column generation algorithm for planning of platform buses that maximizes robustness. We also present a discrete-event simulation model to compare our algorithm to a first-come-first-served heuristic as is used in current practice. Our computational results with real-life data indicate that our algorithm significantly reduces the number of replanning steps and special recovery measures during the day of operation.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)747-757
Number of pages11
JournalComputers and Operations Research
Volume40
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2013

Keywords

  • Airport planning
  • Column generation
  • Integer programming
  • Robustness

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