Airport Ground Service Equipment Allocation

The Ground-Service-Equipment (GSE) allocation problem considers the efficient allocation of GSEs to the tasks to be performed on an airport apron, taking into account the actual availability of GSEs, the GSE-task compatibilities as well as the distances to be covered by GSEs (allocation costs). The problem has been stated in the context of the AAS project, a research funded by the European Commission and aiming at supporting airport ground service operations with advanced technology and algorithms. The procedure to solve the problem has to be integrated in a decision support system operating in a real-time environment, and the available running time is very small. We describe a constructive heuristic that allocates a GSE to one task at each iteration. This allocation is able to take into account the requirements of all the relevant following tasks, thanks to a network representation of the involved tasks, GSEs and related allocation costs. The GSE allocation procedure has been implemented and preliminarily tested on some randomly generated instances of realistic size. Results show that computational time is very small (in the order of a few seconds for these preliminary examples), hence confirming the applicability of the proposed approach to support the real time dispatching of groundside operations.