Coupled passenger simulation to optimise the turnaround process and passenger flow

Abstract

The turnaround process at an airport is a crucial part of flight operations. It is a precisely choreographed sequence of activities and events to ensure aircraft depart on schedule. The individual turnaround processes with passenger movements of boarding and deplaning play a pivotal role, as they are on the critical path of the turnaround. Delays in any of these processes have an immediate impact on the duration of the entire process. If the delay is long enough to cause the flight to miss its scheduled departure slot, the delay will increase even more as a new available slot must be allocated. This in turn will cause further delay. Nevertheless, individual processes in the terminal and within the aircraft cabin are already operating at their local optimum. Our approach is to couple a passenger flow simulation of an airport terminal with a boarding simulation of an aircraft cabin. Aim of this coupling is to investigate how possible developments and restrictions in one of these areas can affect the overall process of the passenger's travel chain. In addition, this coupled simulation can be used to asses, in the long term, whether measures that can already be prepared in the terminal can help make cabin boarding more efficient.For this purpose, we developed a toolbox to analyse and evaluate operational measures along the process chain of travelling at an airport. This paper covers the travel process from security checks to aircraft seat. For this purpose, we refined and coupled an earlier version of a simulation that only covered the airport security check area by adding typical boarding processes of a medium sized international airport. The model is based on a real European airport serving around 12 million passengers per year (as of 2019). The simulation model incorporates a new algorithm calculating the passenger density and contact rate for each passenger in terms of their time and space requirements. Based on the output of the simulations of the process chain in combination with our algorithm we can show the effectiveness of measures like social distancing and their consequences to minimize contact rates along travel processes at airports. The paper describes the modelling, the algorithm to calculate the passenger density and contact rate, as well as results and findings of the simulation runs. It will show how passenger density, capacity, waiting times and waiting space are affected. Finally, we depict the technical visualisation resulting from the coupling of the simulations. For this purpose, common interfaces are defined and parameterised in order to enable a standardized import to a downstream visualisation software. The holistic simulation is used to simulate a wide range of process optimisations and define their impact on the entire process.