Abstract
Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport carried out an upgrading project in 2015. The unloading zone of baggage handling system changed from lateral chutes to carousels. Carousels can unload the baggage of multi-flights simultaneously to solve the problem of insufficient unloading zone. However, there will be some restrictions on arrangement that make the flight-to-unloading zone assignment problem be an important issue of airport management. In this research, we consider the operation requirements of airport, restrictions on the flight, characteristics of carousels, and the convenience of crew operations to solve the flight-to-unloading zone assignment problem. In the peak time with high density of flight arrivals, flights may have no carousels to deal with their baggage. This research divides the scenarios of assignment into the condition with basic assignment restrictions, and the condition that during the paek time, restrictions can be relaxed. The objective is to minimize the number of flights that can not be arranged and minimize the overlap time of unloading. When minimizing both objectives, there will be a Pareto set of optimal solutions that can provide airport management some arrangement results. Results indicate that there are average 162 flights a day, which are about 20~30% flights that have no carousels to unload baggage. These flihts will be arranged to North-board to unload and may result to inconvience of airport management. The basic assignment model proposed in this research can reduce the flights that have no carousels to unload to only 7~12% a day, and avoid using North-board which leads to enhance the sorting error. As considering the relaxed restrictions in peak time, the most effective ways to reduce the flights that have no carousels to unload baggage are let large flight and medium flight can overlap, and to increase the capacity of carousels. It can reduce the flights that have no carousels to unload baggage to about 0~2% a day. That is, there are only 1 to 3 flights in a day that have no carousels to use which baggage have to be handled by manual operation. This research considered the scenarios which have stochastic unloading time and probability of flight delay, then prove that stochastic significantly affect the two performance by simulaton validation. Flight delay will increase the flights that can not be assigned, and variability of unloading time will not only result to more flights that can not be assigned, but also increase the overlap time. The algorithm proposed in this research still shows the robustness when there will be variability of unloading time and probability of flight delay by simulaton verification.