| dc.description.abstract | Because of increased passenger demand, flights and airlines, the demand of checking counters required in Taiwan’s airports increases momentarily. Due to constrained space in airports, existing checking counters are gradually not sufficient for airline uses. Thus, the application of common use counters becomes more popular than before. In literature, there has none systematic analysis or research to the assignment of common use counters to airlines. In practice, for example of the Taiwan CKS airport, the assignment of common use counters is handled in a manual way without optimization from a system perspective. This way is also difficult to resolve large-scale common use counter assignment problems that usually occur in a large airport, for example, an air hub. Hence, this research considers the objective of minimizing total passenger walking distance, coupled with the constraint of allowable inconsistency of flight-to-common-use-counter in different days, and other related operating constraints, to develop an integer programming model in order to help airport authorities solve common use counter assignments.
Due to many complicated factors that have to be considered in the model, the problem size of the model is expected to be huge, which would be difficult to solve and, therefore, not applicable to real world. For this, we develop a heuristic solution framework to solve the model. The preliminary idea is to decompose the original model into three heuristic models. The first heuristic model assigns sharing counters to airlines for a single day with the objective of minimizing total passenger walking distance. The second model solves the minimum projected inconsistency of sharing counter assignments for a single day. Given the minimum inconsistency obtained from the second model, the third model solves the final common use counter assignment. This framework suitably decomposes the originally large-scale problem into several smaller single-day common use counter assignment problems that will be easy to solve in real world. The simplex method with the branch-and-bound technique is employed to solve the single-day common use counter assignment problems. Finally, to test how well the proposed models and the solution algorithms could be applied in real world, we perform a case study concerning the operations of a major airport in Taiwan. To enhance to applicability of the developed models and solution algorithms, we develop computer algorithms, using FORTRAN computer language, and perform tests on personal computers. The results were impressive | en_US |