INFLUENCE OF DEMAND PATTERN ON RELATION BETWEEN OVERALL TURNAROUND TIME AND AVERAGE GATE OCCUPATION DEPENDING ON AVAILABLE RESOURCES

Abstract

It is of strategic and economic importance for airports to know the required deployment of resources needed to efficiently handle aircraft turnarounds while ensuring high customer satisfaction even with considerably varying traffic volumes. This case study, based on traffic data from a mid-sized international European Airport, presents an investigation of relation between the occupation of the boarding and deboarding facility (e.g. passenger gate), which represent the key resource and the overall turnaround time depending on other available necessary resources for some given demand list and its numerous variations. The case study includes extensive simulation results and analysis of resources needed for the turnaround process in various traffic densities and the availability of ground handling resources. The main finding of the simulation data analysis is, that power functions provide very well fitting for the relation between the overall turnaround durations and their related average gate occupations for different considered availabilities of ground handling resources and traffic demands (for the same list of flights). Moreover, to approximate the resource limits for reasonable overall turnaround durations which are comparable to the values gained at the simulations with unlimited resources, it is sufficient to use the median values of the maximal numbers of utilized resources. The method and findings of this study might be valuable to estimate a reasonable utilization of ground handling resources and to calculate the layout of gates for planned or expanding airports to satisfy an expected traffic demand.