EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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3610. Modeling equipment scales of catering trolleys for flight operations

Invited abstract in session MA-25: Discrete, continuous or stochastic optimization and control in networks, transportation and design I , stream Combinatorial Optimization.

Monday, 8:30-10:00
Room: 011 (building: 208)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Hua-An LU

Abstract

Catering trolleys are one of the aircraft’s standard load equipment for food-and-drink services in the cabin. Airlines must prepare sufficient scales to cope with all their passenger flight operations. The catering work must start a few hours before the flight departs, and loaded onboard trolleys cannot be directly reused after arrival before the cleaning process. Trolley types can be divided into regular and half carts by size and volume and are versatilely used on every aircraft type. Aircraft galleys have specific areas with multiple blocks for the side-by-side storage of trolleys, with the principle of “all carts or no cart” for a block, even storing empty ones, to avoid trolleys arbitrarily moving while flying. This study exploited a time-space network graph to express the movement of trolleys between airports and airports. An integer programming model based on this graph was proposed with the decision variables for the numbers of full and half trolleys on the arcs. The objective minimizes the total number of equipment scales subject to the flow conservation and constraints in handling catering trolleys with a safety stock level at each airport. This preliminary research reported the numerical experiments for a Taiwanese airline operating international flights. Tested cases consisted of 43 airports and 643 flights operated with four kinds of fleet and were solved within a reasonable time.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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