Analysis of Airplane Boarding Times
Eitan Bachmat, Daniel Berend, Luba Sapir, Steven Skiena, Natan Stolyarov
Operations Research · 2009 · Volume 57 · Issue 2
Abstract
We model and analyze the process of passengers boarding an airplane. We show how the model yields closed-form estimates for the expected boarding time in many cases of interest. Comparison of our computations with previous work, based on discrete-event simulations, shows a high degree of agreement. Analysis of the model reveals a clear link between the efficiency of various airline boarding policies and a congestion parameter that is related to interior airplane design parameters, such as distance between rows. In particular, as congestion increases, random boarding becomes more attractive among row-based policies.
Keywords
air transportation, stochastic modeling application, space-time geometry, airplane boarding
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