A Two-Door Airplane Boarding Approach When Using Apron Buses
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sustainability Article A Two-Door Airplane Boarding Approach When Using Apron Buses Camelia Delcea * , Liviu-Adrian Cotfas , Nora Chirit,ă and Ionut, Nica Department of Economic Informatics and Cybernetics, Bucharest University of Economic Studies, 010522 Bucharest, Romania; [email protected] (L.-A.C.); [email protected] (N.C.); [email protected] (I.N.) * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +40-769-652-813 Received: 3 September 2018; Accepted: 8 October 2018; Published: 10 October 2018 Abstract: Boarding is one of the major processes of airplane turnaround time, with a direct influence on the airline companies’ costs. From a sustainable point of view, a faster completion of the boarding process has impact not only on the airline company’s long-term performance, but also on customers’ satisfaction and on the airport’s possibility of offering more services without additional investments in new infrastructure. Considering the airplane boarding strategies literature, it can be observed that the latest papers are dealing with developing faster boarding strategies, most of them considering boarding using just one-door of the aircraft. Even though boarding on one-door might be feasible for the airports having the needed infrastructure and sufficient jet-bridges, the situation is different in European airports, as the use of apron buses is fairly common. Moreover, some of the airline companies have adapted their boarding pass in order to reflect which door one should board once they get down from the bus. While using these buses, the boarding strategies developed in the literature are hard to find their applicability. Thus, a new method for boarding on two-door airplanes when apron buses are used is proposed and tested against the actual boarding method. A model is created in NetLogo 6.0.4, taking advantages of the agent-based modeling and used for simulations. The results show a boarding time reduction of 8.91%. Keywords: airplane boarding strategies; agent-based modelling; NetLogo 6.0.4; efficiency evaluation; sustainability; two-door boarding 1. Introduction The airport bus, also known as the “apron bus”, is a bus with a special design which facilitates the transport of passengers and their hand luggage between the airport passenger terminals and airplanes. Considering its characteristics, it can be underlined that typically, the apron buses are wider than normal buses, mostly due to the fact that the regulations concerning the maximum vehicle width are only applicable to public ground and, as an airport represents a private ground, they do not apply in this case. Thus, the manufacturers of this type of buses can choose to increase both its width and its length. Moreover, the transfer buses are usually fitted with a reduced number of seats, with large windows, and most of the passengers standing during the journey. Driving cabs can be encountered at both ends, making their operation easier, while the maximum speed is somewhere around 40 km/h. For the airports in Europe, it is fairly common to use two apron buses, instead of one, for transporting the travelers to their aircraft before boarding, especially for flights having 150–200 passengers. Some of the European airports that use the apron buses are: Madrid, Munich, Pisa, Frankfurt, London Luton, Amsterdam Schiphol, Kharkiv, Bucharest, Salzburg, Stuttgart, etc. In August 2018, the COBUS Industries, which provided apron buses to the Salzburg Airport for several years, sold the first fully electric power-driven airport bus. The Salzburg Airport representatives Sustainability 2018, 10, 3619; doi:10.3390/su10103619 www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability Sustainability 2018, 10, 3619 2 of 14 underlined that they used the apron buses for more than 1800 h of operation and the switch to the new power-driven buses will help them save about 20,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide per year [1]. In October 2015, the fully power-driven bus was presented to the Munich Airport: the e-COBUS 3000 model. Since then, 43 busses have been sold in Europe, North America, and Asia [1]. The practice of using apron buses is widely implemented in Europe, due to the continuous increase in the number of flights while airports can provide only limited jet-bridge capacity. Moreover, in some cases, it might also happen that the airplane is too small for a jet bridge. Then, the only solution, apart from letting the passengers walk directly from the gate to the plane, is using apron buses. Thus, the present paper analyzes the needed time to board an airplane when both doors of the airplane are used and the passengers arrive through the use of the apron buses. For this, we consider an agent-based approach in which the passengers are modeled as agents having their own set of rules and trying to find their place within the airplane as fast as possible. Moreover, as in the airplane boarding literature, a series of boarding methods have been proposed for the jet-bridge situation—as presented in the next section. We aim to determine if using the back-to-front method for the airplane passengers boarding when apron buses are employed is feasible and if the boarding time can be reduced in a significant manner. To the best of our knowledge, there are currently no other approaches for boarding using apron buses found in the published literature. As for the simulation, an Airbus A320 aircraft configuration with 30 seat rows was used, as presented in Figure1 with a classical grid-representation [2]. Figure 1. Airbus A320 configuration with 30 seat rows. 2. Delay Times and Boarding Methods Eurocontrol [3] publishes yearly results regarding the airplanes delays in European countries. Comparing the results from 2017 with the ones in 2016, it can be observed that the average delay time per airplane has increased by 9.11% in 2017, reaching as much as 12.4 min of delay. 2.1. Air Transportation Delay and its Causes in European Airports Regarding the causes that have contributed to the airplane delay, seven main causes can be underlined, three of them having a greater impact: reactionary, airline, and airport causes, as shown in Figure2. Figure 2. Delay causes in 2017 in European airports [3]. Sustainability 2018, 10, 3619 3 of 14 The reactionary causes include the late arrival of the aircraft, crew, passenger, or load causes. Besides the fact that it produces the greatest part of the average delay time (44.03% in 2017), it has been determined that the reactionary delay is dependent on the delays made by other airplanes in the network. For example, for all European flights in 2014, each minute of primary delay induced an average of 0.8 min of reactionary delay within the network [4]. As for the airport and airplane delay causes: together, these count as much as 38.16% of the total average delay time in 2017, being determined by delays due to passenger and luggage, flight operations and crew, or restrictions at departure airport. Figure3 presents the average delay for each category of causes in 2017 and 2016. It can be observed that all the causes contributing to delay have increased values in 2017 as compared to 2016. Figure 3. Average delay by category in minutes [3]. 2.2. Boarding Methods Various approaches exist related to passengers boarding into the airplane. Some of them are considering the passengers as being a compact group and decide boarding them in a random manner. From this category, one can refer to the random with or without assigned seats methods. In both methods, the passenger line up and enter one after the other in the airplane. The only difference between the two methods is that in the case of boarding without assigned seats, the passengers, once arrived in the aircraft, are free to select their own preferred seat, while in the assigned seat method, they just have to walk down the aisle and find the place stamped on their tickets [5]. Another method, which has the same characteristics once the passengers are inside of the aircraft as the random without assigned seats method, is the open seating method. The difference in this case is represented by what is happening with the passengers before entering the airplane, as they are assigned to a group based on their check-in times. Knowing the group they are assigned to the passengers align next to the column representing their group number and wait to be invited for boarding. On the other hand, newly-developed boarding methods, all of them having an assigned seat for each passenger, have faced two main developing directions: “by group” boarding or “by seat” boarding. The “by group” boarding splits the passengers within different groups and invites them to board over a specific scheme. This method is also employed for the “by seat” methods; however, in this case, each passenger is called to enter the airplane and find their seat. From the “by group” boarding, the following boarding methods have been developed and tested in the literature: outside-in (also known as window-middle-aisle or WilMA), reverse pyramid, back-to-front, rotating zone, modified optimal method, and the non-traditional method [6–8]. A short description of them can be found in Table1. A series of variations of these methods have also been developed in the literature by considering half-zones or by using a row based approach [9]. Sustainability 2018, 10, 3619 4 of 14 Table 1. Short description of “by group” boarding methods. Classification Boarding Method Main Idea The passengers are divided into three groups depending on their seat position: Outside-in (WilMA) * near the window, middle, or aisle. The first called-in group is formed by the passengers with seats near the window, then middle, and last aisle.