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Featured Application: The work focuses on analyzing airplane boarding methods used in normal times and evaluating them by applying lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, the airplane boarding methods used in practice by the airlines are analyzed through a series of health risks indicators and an operational indicator—the boarding time. The COVID-19 pandemic has produced changes in the entire aviation industry, including adjustments by airlines to keep the middle seats of airplanes empty to reduce the risk of disease spread. In this context, the scientific literature has introduced new metrics related to passengers' health when comparing airplane boarding methods in addition to the previous objective of minimizing boarding time. As the pandemic concludes and the aviation industry returns to the pre-pandemic situation, we leverage what we learned during the pandemic to reduce the health risk to passengers when they are not social distancing. In this paper, we examine the performance of classical airplane boarding methods in normal times but while considering the health metrics established during the pandemic and new metrics related to passenger health in the absence of social distancing. In addition to being helpful in normal times, the analysis may be particularly helpful in situations when people think everything is normal but an epidemic has begun prior to being acknowledged by the medical scientific community. The reverse pyramid boarding method provides favorable values for most health metrics in this context while also minimizing the time to complete boarding of the airplane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has imposed the need for a series of social distancing restrictions worldwide to mitigate the scourge of the COVID-19 pandemic. This applies to many domains, including airplane boarding and seat assignments. As airlines are considering their passengers' safety during the pandemic, boarding methods should be evaluated both in terms of social distancing norms and the resulting efficiency for the airlines. The present paper analyzes the impact of a series of restrictions that have been imposed or mooted worldwide on the boarding methods used by the airlines, featuring the use of jet-bridges and one-door boarding. To compare the efficacy of classical airplane boarding methods with respect to new social distancing norms, five metrics were used to evaluate their performance. One metric is the time to complete the boarding of the airplane. The other four metrics concern passenger health and reflect the potential exposure to the virus from other passengers through the air and surfaces (e.g., headrests and luggage) touched by passengers. We use the simulation platform in NetLogo to test six common boarding methods under various conditions. The back-to-front by row boarding method results in the longest time to complete boarding but has the advantage of providing the lowest health risk for two metrics. Those two metrics are based on passengers potentially infecting those passengers previously seated in the rows they traverse. Interestingly, those two risks are reduced for most boarding methods when the social distance between adjacent passengers advancing down the aisle is increased, thus indicating an unanticipated benefit stemming from this form of social distancing. The modified reverse pyramid by half zone method provides the shortest time to the completing boarding of the airplane and—along with the WilMA boarding method—provides the lowest health risk stemming from potential infection resulting from seat interferences. Airlines have the difficult task of making tradeoffs between economic productivity and the resulting impact on various health risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the time to complete the boarding of a partially occupied two-door airplane when its passengers are transported from the airport terminal to the airplane using two apron buses. We propose a greedy method that assigns each passenger to a particular apron bus based on the passengers' airplane seat assignments. This greedy approach exploits the airplane's symmetry by providing essentially the same method for those boarding through the front door of the airplane as those boarding through the rear door of the airplane. The symmetrical properties of window, middle, and aisle seats of each row/side are considered in the proposed method as well. Computer simulation results indicate that, when using the greedy method, the boarding time can be reduced by up to 8.33% compared to the boarding time resulting from the best known practices in the literature, and with up to a 43.72% improvement in boarding time when compared to the boarding method commonly used in many airports. Furthermore, experimental results confirm our hypothesis that when the capacity of the apron buses exceeds the number of passengers to be transported to the airplane, the most time-efficient results of the proposed greedy method occur when an equal number of passengers are assigned to each of the two apron buses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimally organizing passengers boarding/deboarding an airplane offers a potential way to reduce the airplane turn time. The main contribution of our work is that we evaluate seven boarding strategies and two structured deboarding strategies by using a surrogate experimental test. Instead of boarding a real or mocked airplane, we carried out the experiment by organizing 40 participants to board a school bus with ten rows of four seats, symmetrically distributed on a single, central aisle. Experimental results confirm that the optimized strategies, i.e., Steffen and Steffen-lug, are superior to the traditional ones, i.e., Back-to-front, Window-to-aisle, and Random in time-saving and stability. However, the two structured deboarding strategies failed to reduce the deboarding time, and this result strongly suggests the prerequisites of applying such strategies only when, on average, passengers have a large amount of luggage. Besides, we further carried out a questionnaire survey of participants' preferences on seat layout and discussed how those preferences influence the boarding time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Airlines have launched various ancillary services to meet their passengers' requirements and to increase their revenue. Ancillary revenue from seat selection is an important source of revenue for airlines and is a common type of advertisement. However, advertisements are generally delivered to all customers, including a significant proportion of people who do not wish to pay for seat selection. Random advertisements may thus decrease the amount of profit generated since users will tire of useless advertising, leading to a decrease in user stickiness. To solve this problem, we propose a Bagging in Certain Ratio Light Gradient Boosting Machine (BCR-LightGBM) to predict the willingness of passengers to pay to choose their seats. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms all 12 comparison models in terms of the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC) and F1-score. Furthermore, we studied two typical samples to demonstrate the decision-making phase of a decision tree in BCR-LightGBM and applied the Shapley additive explanation (SHAP) model to analyse the important influencing factors to further enhance the interpretability. We conclude that the customer's values, the ticket fare, and the length of the trip are three factors that airlines should consider in their seat selection service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]