New boarding strategies for a novel aircraft cabin installed with side-slip seats

Abstract

The traditional method of relieving boarding congestion is to reduce aisle and seat conflicts by optimizing the boarding strategy. Here, we focus on another way of smoothing the passenger flow for a novel cabin installed with side-slip seats. Three aspects are discussed in this work. First, we explore the characteristics of fast boarding sequences that benefit most from side-slip seats using a simulated annealing algorithm. Second, we introduce three alternative strategies and evaluate their efficiencies using a realistic aircraft boarding model. The result shows that the boarding time could be largely reduced by adopting the new strategies. Sensitivity analyses also imply that side-slip seats are tolerable to the number of inexperienced passengers who are unfamiliar with the side-slip seats. Besides, the infection risk is also discussed as a function of ticket validation time at the check desk. Third, a boarding assistant system is designed to implement the proposed strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Aircraft boarding
• side-slip seats
• simulated annealing algorithm
• cellular automaton
• boarding assistant system

Acknowledgements

This work is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 72001081).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authors’ contributions

Shengjie Qiang (Conceptualization: Lead; Methodology: Equal; Validation: Equal; Visualization: Equal; Writing: Equal); Qingxia Huang (Methodology: Equal; Validation: Equal; Visualization: Equal; Writing: Equal)

Data availability

The source code of the involved simulation work of this study is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China: [Grant Number 72001081].