Scheduling optimisation of multi-type special vehicles in an airport

Abstract

An insufficient number of ground support vehicles and improper dispatch have a significant impact on the quality of airport services. The reasonable dispatch of airport special vehicles can greatly improve the efficiency of airport services. In this paper, a bi-objective mixed-integer programming model is proposed which takes the minimum number of vehicles required and minimum total extra time cost of special vehicles as objectives. Additionally, the service constraint relationship of various vehicles and the reusable nature of vehicles to make full use of existing special vehicle resources are considered. To easily solve the model, the comprehensive scheduling problem is reduced to several sub-problems with parallel services and timing constraints. A non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm with multiple chromosomes and an elite strategy are developed to solve them separately. Finally, using the actual flight data of a domestic airport, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and offer useful managerial insights.

KEYWORDS:

• Special vehicles
• mixed integer programming
• multi-chromosome genetic algorithm
• bi-objective optimisation

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 71890972/71890970, 71621001], the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number 2021RC237] and the 111 Projet [grant number B20071].