Arranging the order of passengers on the boarding bridge to reduce the boarding time for single-aisle aircraft

TL;DR

This paper proposes an efficient passenger ordering strategy at the boarding gate for single-aisle aircraft, significantly reducing boarding times compared to traditional methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel rearrangement approach for passenger order at boarding gates, improving efficiency over conventional group boarding strategies.

Findings

Rearrangement reduces boarding time in simulations

The method is applicable efficiently to waiting queues

Mechanism underlying time reduction is analyzed

Abstract

Reducing the aircraft boarding time is a common problem not only for airlines, but also for passengers and airports. Group boarding is a popular boarding strategy that separates the passengers into several groups and those groups, which are then called in a certain order. Group boarding can reduce the boarding time compared with that in random order boarding; however, it is insufficient in several real scenarios because the passengers are not separated strictly into groups. In this paper, we propose a boarding strategy that arranges the order of the boarding passengers at the boarding gate. Although this approach appears more time-consuming, we show that such a rearrangement can be applied efficiently to the waiting queue of a single-aisle aircraft. We quantitatively demonstrate the boarding times for various patterns of this approach and discuss the mechanism underlying the reduction of boarding time. This strategy is a promising approach to reduce boarding times and can replace the conventional boarding strategy.