Scheduling Aircraft Ground Handling Operations Under Uncertainty Using Critical Path Analysis and Monte Carlo Simulation: Survey and Research Directions

Introduction

Aircraft ground handling represents a crucial process among airport activities as it affects directly airline performance also passengers’ service quality perception. Ground handling addresses a number of operations requirements of an aircraft between the time it arrives at a terminal gate of an airport and the time it departs on its next flight. Ground handlers need to orchestrate a number of activities, such as baggage handling, cabin servicing, catering, aircraft fueling, maintenance and so on. Indeed, safety, accuracy, and speed are important in ground handling operations for a minimum turnaround and resulting increased efficiencies. Due to the practical importance of the subject many books and articles have been published on its various aspects (Atkin, 2013; Bazargan, 2016). The 32^nd International Air Transport Association (IATA) Ground Handling Conference took place in Madrid, Spain (IGHC, 2019). However, the majority of the research focused on the classical airport airside optimisation problems, such as gate assignment (Dijk et al., 2018; Chao et al., 2019), aircraft ground movement (Stergianos et al., 2016; Brownlee et al., 2018), and runway sequencing (Guépet et al., 2017; Solak et al., 2018). In this paper, scheduling aircraft ground handling operations with uncertain durations using the critical path analysis and Monte Carlo simulation is considered with the aim of improving aircraft ground services during the turnaround in general, and equipment availability, and the crew assignment in particular. A case study of a hub airport on a long-range wide-body twin-engine jet aircraft is discussed in detail.