Reassignments of Airport Luggage Loading Carousels Following Incidents

With the rise of budget airlines and the increase of red-eye flights, to cope with the huge passenger volume the straight-line baggage conveyor in the departure section in Taoyuan International Airport had been changed to baggage unloading carousel in 2015, hoping to improve the efficiency. In practice, for the current operation of Taoyuan international airport departure baggage unloading carousel, when there are some baggage unloading carousels temporarily broken down, the airport authorities still adjust the assignment of flights to baggage unloading carousels in a manual way without a system optimization analysis, which is neither effective nor efficient, usually resulting in waste of resources and increase of costs. Therefore, it is currently an important issue to effectively adjust the assignments of flights to baggage unloading carousels in a short time, considering the cost of the operator and the level of service of users (passenger, airline, etc.), so that the system can be quickly restored to its normal operation.Aiming to minimize the total of disturbance time and overlapping time of all flights, this study will construct an assignment model of flights to airport baggage unloading carousels, for the temporary malfunction of airport passenger baggage unloading carousels. Because the problem sizes faced in real practices are expected to be very large, it would be difficult to use the CPLEX to solve for the optimal solution. Therefore, this research will adopt the genetic algorithm to develop a heuristic method that can efficiently solve the model. Finally, a case study, coupled with a number of sensitivity/scenario analyses, will be performed using real data from an international airport in Taiwan to evaluate the proposed model and heuristic algorithm. Finally, beside the contribution to the academics, we hope that the model and the solution algorithm could be useful references for the airport authorities to optimize the adjustment of flights assigned to baggage unloading carousels for the temporary malfunction of airport passenger baggage unloading carousels, so as to improve the usage of passenger baggage unloading carousels, reduce the inconvenience of ground crews, and maintain the airport level of service.