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Airplane boarding - connections to project planning and optics

Subject Area Accounting and Finance
Term from 2018 to 2023
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 404483117
 
Final Report Year 2024

Final Report Abstract

The airplane boarding process is a crucial task during ground operations. If boarding is sped up, cost savings up to $250 per minute are reported in the literature. Even though the problem of developing and realizing an efficient boarding is of high economic value, there is a big research gap in this area. Indeed, there are quite a few publications on simulation approaches. However, empirical data on the influencing factors on airplane boarding times and the statistical evaluation of which is missing, even though they are the basis for every simulation approach. Moreover, there is a lack of analytical models, which explain the characteristics of the boarding problem. In this project, we close this gap. In the first part of the project, there are three major work packages. Firstly, in collaboration with Deutsche Lufthansa AG, we collect real data, which is then used for hypothesis testing on the influencing factors on airplane boarding times. Moreover, a first analytical model for describing the boarding process in a very specific setting is extended so that it reflects real life situations and allows for estimating real life boarding times. In a third stage, simulation models known from literature and the analytical model are compared with each other using the real-life data so that a most adequate forecasting model for boarding times is determined. Moreover, in this step common boarding strategies and newly developed boarding strategies are compared with each other so that managerial insights on the best boarding strategies are obtained. Within the first part of the project, several new research questions arose, which especially show connections to other research fields, and which promise a mutual stimulation of these fields. Naturally, there are some connections between boarding and project planning. More surprisingly, there are close relations between optics and boarding (and thus project planning). Indeed, we show that lenses can be used to describe boarding methods and project plans. The construction of lenses allows us to define boarding methods in which a decent share of slow passengers (those with hand luggage) does not increase boarding time compared to a situation with only fast passengers. Besides that, connections to server farms and biological processes are given. Moreover, the first part of the project delivered a huge study on passengers’ preferences in aviation with over 1,500 participants from three countries. The evaluations of the data revealed the somewhat surprising result that a considerable share of passengers prefers a low individual boarding time over a short total boarding time even if this implies a possible delayed departure. Thus, we analyzed how boarding methods perform on the average individual boarding time as a measure for customer satisfaction.

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