Research On Vehicles Scheduling Problems In Airport Ground Service

Along with the rapid development of aviation industry, the flows of passengers and goods of airports are annually increasing, especially those large international airports, e.g. Beijing Capital International Airport and Hong Kong International Airport. Meanwhile, the rapid increase brings more and more pressure to these airports. Both their current facilities and scheduling methods need to be improved to accommodate the increased flows. Therefore, flight delays often occur, which seriously damaged the service quality of the airports. According to the statistics, inefficient scheduling is one of the main causes of flight delays. Scheduling of airport ground services is the key part of the whole scheduling process. Airport ground services provide services that the flights need before taking off, including oil supplementation and water supplementation etc. All these stuff are transported by service trucks and each service corresponds to one kind of trucks. Hence, efficient scheduling plays a key role in decreasing flight delays, flight safety, increasing service quality and economic growth. Currently, scheduling of airport ground services is mainly based on expert experiences and limited to the single resource scheduling.Some characteristics are found after analyzing the process of the airport ground services. First, because the ground services have to start after flights'landing and before the planes taking off, the services times should be constrained in the time windows. Second, different planes need different amounts of service stuff (e.g. water and oil), and some services can be paralleled and some can not. Based on above characteristics, the scheduling problem is modeled under the framework of classic Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW). The main work of this paper includes analyzing and summarizing the art of state of airport ground services scheduling problem and VRPTW, analyzing the operation process and characteristics of ground services and factors of VRPTW. A multi-objective programming model is established. In addition, a simple and effective two-phase heuristic is developed and applied to practical data of Hong Kong International Airport, which verified the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.