Abstract
For daily airport operations, the insufficient number and the improper scheduling of ground support vehicles are the main causes of flight delays. In this paper, a novel network model is proposed to complement the optimal scheduling of ferry vehicles for the flight ground support service. In the process of model construction, we first innovatively construct a ferry vehicle capacity network by having the introduced virtual flights and the ferry vehicle depot as nodes, in which the directed edges indicate that the two nodes associated may be consecutively served by the same ferry vehicle. Based on the capacity network, a mixed integer programming model is constructed to minimize the number of ferry vehicles needed. In addition, this paper shows that the mixed integer programming is equivalent to a linear programming when the service start time of each flight is fixed, which makes the solving process more efficient, and the linear programming model can be applied to solve the minimum node-disjoint path cover of directed acyclic graphs. The efficiency and accuracy of the method are validated by the actual flight data obtained from Beijing Capital International Airport. This study will provide a methodological reference for the optimal scheduling of airport ferry vehicles.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ben Abdelaziz, F., Masri, H., & Alaya, H. (2017). A recourse goal programming approach for airport bus routing problem. Annals of Operations Research, 251(1–2), 383–396.
Bennell, J. A., Mesgarpour, M., & Potts, C. N. (2013). Airport runway scheduling. Annals of Operations Research, 204(1), 249–270.
Bertsimas, D., Jaillet, P., & Martin, S. (2019). Online vehicle routing: The edge of optimization in large-scale applications. Operations Research, 67(1), 143–162.
Civil Aviation Administration of China. (2019). Civil Aviation Airport production statistics bulletin in 2018. Civil Aviation Administration of China. Retrieved June 1, 2019, from http://www.caac.gov.cn/XXGK/XXGK/TJSJ/201903/t20190305_194972.html.
Das, G. S., Gzara, F., & Stutzle, T. (2020). A review on airport gate assignment problems: Single versus multi objective approaches. Omega-International Journal of Management Science, 92, 1–12.
Dorndorf, U., Jaehn, F., & Pesch, E. (2012). Flight gate scheduling with respect to a reference schedule. Annals of Operations Research, 194(1), 177–187.
Du, J. Y., Brunner, J. O., & Kolisch, R. (2014). Planning towing processes at airports more efficiently. Transportation Research Part E-Logistics and Transportation Review, 70, 293–304.
Ip, W. H., Wang, D. W., & Cho, V. (2013). Aircraft ground service scheduling problems and their genetic algorithm with hybrid assignment and sequence encoding scheme. IEEE Systems Journal, 7(4), 649–657.
Li, Q. W., Bi, J., & Li, Z. Y. (2017). Research on ferry vehicle scheduling problem within airport operations. In 10th international symposium on computational intelligence and design (pp. 248–251).
Liu, Y., Zhang, J., Ding, C., & Bi, J. (2019). Modeling and heuristic algorithm of ground ferry vehicle scheduling in large airports. In Proceedings of the 19th COTA international conference of transportation professionals (pp. 159–170).
Norin, A., Yuan, D., Granberg, T. A., & Varbrand, P. (2012). Scheduling de-icing vehicles within airport logistics: A heuristic algorithm and performance evaluation. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 63(8), 1116–1125.
Padron, S., & Guimarans, D. (2019). An improved method for scheduling aircraft ground handling operations from a global perspective. Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research, 36(4), 1–25.
Padron, S., Guimarans, D., Ramos, J. J., & Fitouri-Trabelsi, S. (2016). A bi-objective approach for scheduling ground-handling vehicles in airports. Computers & Operations Research, 71, 34–45.
Schrijver, A. (1998). Theory of linear and integer programming. New York: Wiley.
Schyns, M. (2015). An ant colony system for responsive dynamic vehicle routing. European Journal of Operational Research, 245(3), 704–718.
Vazifeh, M. M., Santi, P., Resta, G., Strogatz, S. H., & Ratti, C. (2018). Addressing the minimum fleet problem in on-demand urban mobility. Nature, 557(7706), 534–538.
Weiszer, M., Chen, J., & Locatelli, G. (2015). An integrated optimisation approach to airport ground operations to foster sustainability in the aviation sector. Applied Energy, 157, 567–582.
Zhao, P. X., Gao, W. Q., Han, X., & Luo, W. H. (2019a). Bi-objective collaborative scheduling optimization of airport ferry vehicle and tractor. International Journal of Simulation Modelling, 18(2), 355–365.
Zhao, P. X., Han, X., & Wan, D. (2019b). Evaluation of the airport ferry vehicle scheduling based on network maximum flow model. Omega-International Journal of Management Science. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.omega.2019.102178.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Social Science Planning Research Project of Shandong Province (Grant Number 20CGLJ11); the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (Grant Numbers ZR2015GM012, ZR2017MG012); the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number 71772106); and the Humanity and Social Science Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (Grant Number 17YJCZH198).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Han, X., Zhao, P., Meng, Q. et al. Optimal scheduling of airport ferry vehicles based on capacity network. Ann Oper Res 295, 163–182 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-020-03743-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-020-03743-0