Airport Ground Service Equipment Allocation

The development of air traffic during the last years has greatly increased the density of aircraft in the airspace and the congestion on major airports. Indeed, sensible delays may be caused by ground operations and it is crucial to develop decision support tools helping increasing the efficiency and the safety of the apron area. This is the purpose of the recently launched European sponsored project “Integrated Airport Apron Safety Fleet Management – AAS”. In this paper, we consider the problem of efficiently providing the necessary ground service equipment and staff to aircraft on the apron. We propose a mathematical formulation for the problem and prove that the problem is NP-hard. A fast sequential heuristic is then suggested, to integrate the already existing real time dispatching decision support system. The procedure has been preliminary tested with data from one major airport, showing to be able to improve efficiency and reduce delays caused by handling operations.