Social distancing in airplane seat assignments for passenger groups

Abstract

We provide a mixed-integer programming model (MIP) to assign airplane passengers to seats while preserving two types of social distancing: the distance from the passengers’ seats to the aisle and the distance among groups of passengers who are not travelling together. The method assigns passengers travelling within a family group to seats near others of the same group. We present a heuristic algorithm to solve the proposed MIP. This algorithm is warm started with an initial seat assignment. Stochastic simulation experiments using the new method confirm that more passengers can be assigned safely to the seats when family groups are considered. For a certain load of passengers, as the percentage of family groups compared to singleton passengers increases, the model can practice social distancing among more passengers from different groups. The proposed model provides a superior seating assignment compared to an airline policy of blocking all middle-seats.

KEYWORDS:

• Airplane seat assignment
• airplane group boarding
• COVID-19
• SARS-CoV-2
• social distancing
• mixed-integer programming

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 We also refer to a singleton passenger as a one-member group. Moreover, the general term ‘group’ refers to as both ‘family group’ and ‘one-member’ groups.

2 Please refer to Salari et al. (2020) for more details on the seat distance calculation.

3 For the results presented in Table 3, we set the weights of objective function as 0.5, 0, 0.5 for $w_1,w_2\mathrm{\&}{w}_3$, respectively.

4 The details of the group generation for each trial are explained in the Appendix.