Improving Airport Ground Operations with Operations Research

Abstract

Efficient airport ground operations are critical to ensuring smooth passenger flows, minimising delays, and improving the overall performance of the air transportation system. However, increasing air traffic demand, limited ground resources, and complex operational constraints pose significant challenges for airports and airlines. This seminar presents Prof. Zhou’s recent works on optimising airport ground operations through operations research methodologies, focusing on three interrelated problems. 

First, Prof. Zhou will investigate the air-ground collaborative scheduling problem, which integrates the sequencing of runway, taxiway, apron, and airspace resources to improve coordination between air and ground operations. Next, he will address the airline-oriented apron assignment problem, including aircraft towing operations, proposing innovative optimisation models and solution algorithms to balance operational efficiency with towing costs. Finally, he will explore an online retrieval and storage algorithm for robotic baggage handling, which enables real-time optimisation of baggage storage and retrieval under dynamic passenger demands.

Speaker

Prof. Chenhao Zhou is a Professor at the School of Management, Northwestern Polytechnical University. He received his PhD from the Department of Industrial Systems Engineering and Management at the National University of Singapore in 2017 and subsequently served as a Research Assistant Professor there until 2020. He is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Simulation and the Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research.

Prof. Zhou’s research focuses on planning and scheduling problems in the maritime and aviation industries, and he maintains close collaboration with China Eastern Airlines. He has published numerous papers in leading journals, including Transportation Science, European Journal of Operational Research, Transportation Research Part E, and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. His research has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Shaanxi Provincial Key R&D Program, Norinco Innovation Research Institute, and Shaanxi Logistics Group.