A Fast Heuristic for Airport Ground-Service Equipment-and-Staff Allocation

With the recent increase of air traffic, major airports become more and more congested: sensible delays may be caused by ground operations, and problems related to the efficiency and the safety of the apron area assume more and more importance. In this paper, we consider the problem of determining an efficient allocation of ground service equipment and staff to aircraft standing on the apron, as emerged in the framework of the European sponsored project “Integrated Airport Apron Safety Fleet Management – AAS”. After providing a mathematical formulation for the problem, we suggest a fast sequential heuristic to be integrated in the real time dispatching decision support systems normally adopted in modern airports. The procedure has been applied in the AAS context, showing to be able to improve efficiency of handling operations.