Analysis of Airplane Boarding Times

Analysis of Airplane Boarding Times

Abstract
We model and analyze the process of passengers boarding an airplane. We show how
the model yields closed-form estimates for the expected boarding time in many cases of
interest. The computations reveal a clear link between the e ciency of various airline
boarding policies and interior airplane design parameters, such as distance between rows.
Comparison of our results with previous work, based on discrete event simulations, shows
a high degree of agreement. Our work thus provides an explanation and theoretical
foundation for these previous results, while allowing greater
exibility in terms of exploring
many parameter settings.


http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~ebachmat/managesubmit.pdf