New Developments in Airport Baggage Handling Systems

Abstract

In this paper, new concepts for baggage transport to and from narrow-body aircraft are presented. Current baggage transport is labor intensive and bears the risk of damaging or losing bags. Moreover, it is time-critical because of tight flight schedules. An alternative transport and scheduling method, as well as the application of a prototype of a partly automated baggage loading and unloading vehicle (baggage truck) have been investigated using simulation, and this is reported in the first part of the paper. It appears that considerable savings are possible when using both the scheduling method and the new baggage vehicle. An increased security level is also to be expected. The prototype baggage truck has been further developed into a swap-body concept; this is presented in the second part of the paper.

Keywords:

• Airport
• baggage handling
• discrete simulation
• narrow-body aircraft
• security