Synchronizing transportation of people with reduced mobility through airport terminals

Abstract

Navigating through an airport is easy enough for most passengers, but when you are reduced in mobility it is a different story. In this paper we are looking at an airport that assists between 300 and 500 of those passengers daily. We want to find a schedule for the airport's employees to support as many of those passengers as possible while ensuring a smooth journey with little waiting time. In addition we want to find a robust schedule to handle minor disturbances which we test using a simulation at the end. We present a decomposition model in which we first determine feasible start times for the tasks describing the journeys of the passengers using Simulated Annealing, after which in each iteration we assign the tasks to the employees in the next phase using a matching algorithm or heuristic. Experimental results show that our algorithm is able to ensure smooth connections while supporting nearly every passenger in the given instances.