Abstract
In recent years, the number of flights and baggage in Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport (TPE) increase year after year. In consequence, the type of unloading area in baggage handling system is changed from unloading belt lateral to carousel. Carousel has bigger capacity so that ground service can carry the baggage for more than two flights simultaneously. Nonetheless, owing to the decrease in unloading area, the flights need to be rearranged. If the flight is not arranged well, more than one flight may be arranged to the same carousel at the same time. As a result, the carousel may malfunction because of too much baggage. Besides, it will make the ground service hard to differentiate the baggage of different flights so that the possibility of mishandling of baggage may increase. In order to arrange all flights to carousel in an appropriate way, in this paper, under consideration to the impact of traveling time, we use “min overlap time” as the objective of unloading zone assignment problem. For the sake of taking the influence of simulation model on traveling time into consideration, we propose to use a hybrid simulation-analytical approach to benefit from two models in order to get ideal and optimal solution in less computational effort. Besides, we collect a lot of historical data and use data fitting to generate different input data to avoid subjective experimental result. In addition to overlap time, baggage with manual operation can also reflect the possibility of mishandling of baggage. And we know that the setting of carousel-opening time is the main influencing factor of baggage with manual operation. In the cause of improving the overall considerations so as to decrease possibility of mishandling of baggage, we can find better parameter setting of carousel-opening time and unloading zone assignment solution under comprehensive consideration of these two performances. In this paper, we conduct experiments and perform analysis by hybrid simulation-analytical approach. The experimental results show that it performs well by one iteration. It can reduce 77 percent of overlap time on average compared to practical arrangements. Besides, the experimental results also show that different unloading zones and time intervals have their own suitable methods of arrangement. As a result, we can provide experimental results and suggestion to airport managers and BHS managers. And managers can take as a reference step by step when making decision.