OPTIMAL REASSIGNMENT OF FLIGHTS TO AIRPORT BAGGAGE UNLOADING CAROUSELS IN RESPONSE TO TEMPORARY MALFUNCTIONS

Being able to efficiently reassign outbound flights to baggage unloading carousels (BUCs) following temporary malfunctions is very important for airport operators. This study proposes an optimization model with a heuristic to solve the carousel reassignment problem. The objective is to minimize the total disturbance and overlapping time caused by the reassignment of outbound flights. A heuristic is developed to efficiently solve large-sized instances. The proposed approach is then applied to solve real-world instances of the problem at a major international airport in Taiwan. The computation time is about two minutes. The objective value obtained with the heuristic is more than 15% better than that obtained by the manual approach currently used by the operator. The improvement is gained mostly from the reduction in total temporal disturbance and overlapping time. The proposed approach could assist the operator in reassigning outbound flights to BUCs in response to malfunctions.