Cooperative scheduling optimization for ground-handling vehicles by considering flights’ uncertainty

The ground-handling vehicle services of airports are facing significant challenges due to the uncertainty of actual flight arrival time, leading to low resource utilization efficiency and unreasonable service sequence. Moreover, there are different properties (service objects and service orders) of ground-handling vehicles that are not only challenging for modeling schedules of various vehicles but also increase the difficulty when dealing with coordination optimization among all different kinds of ground-handling vehicles. In this paper, the refuellers and shuttle buses would be integrated to provide a more realistic and coordinated optimization schedule for ground-handling vehicles’ dispatching. Specifically, multi-objective mixed integer programming is developed to optimize the priority of services and corresponding service time window by minimizing service costs and time losses. Then, the uncertainty of the flights’ actual arrival time is described by the method of chance constraints. Subsequently, the proposed model is utilized at the Beijing Capital Airport to indicate the effectiveness of the proposed modeling framework. Results demonstrate that significant service performance gains (reduced by 66% in time exceeding the planned departure time, 45% in extra waiting time of vehicles, 40% in flights not departing on schedule, and increased by 31% in the absorption of delay time, etc.), which demonstrates its application in solving schedule problems among other airports.