The Study Of Passenger Boarding Strategy For Wide-body Aircraft

With the increasing amount of air passengers in our country, it is becoming more and more important to reduce the turnaround time of the flight. Boarding time accounted for 1/3 of the turnaround time, so improving the boarding efficiency can effectively reduce the turnaround time. In this paper, the model of cellular automata is extended to the application of the wide-body aircraft A330-300 to study the boarding strategy which made up for the lack of wide-body aircraft boarding strategy research in the past. The boarding times with three different boarding door usage and eight different passing time intervals were calculated and analyzed how much door usage and time interval affected passenger boarding time. Next, when the occupancy and the number of early passengers changed, the sensitivity of boarding time could be studied. Then we analyzed the robustness of each boarding strategy when the number of passenger baggage and passengers compliance changed. The suggestions for boarding were put forward by simulating 7 major categories of 15 kinds of boarding strategies with different types of flights, occupancy and characteristics of the passenger. The suggestions combined boarding strategy, usage of doors and time interval to shorten boarding time. In addition, the results which combined with the different luggage distribution showed that the control of carry-on luggage could reduce the boarding time. Therefore, it is suggested that airlines and airports should strengthen the management of carry-on baggage to reduce the boarding time and improve efficiency.