Optimising the management of arriving baggage at a Kuwait Airways passenger terminal using mathematical programming and simulation

Abstract

Handling luggage systems is a critical component of a passenger terminal’s operations. The proposed study attempts to find the optimal solution for a manually operated terminal concerning the luggage offloading process from arrival flights carried by a limited number of ground handling agents. Handling agents start the offloading process from the aircraft to the cargo luggage containers carried by a cargo car that will take the containers’ trolleys to the cargo area to offload them into the reserved luggage belt carousel. This study aims to improve airport service quality by minimizing the baggage handling process time for arrival flights which leads to minimizing passenger waiting time in the baggage claim area. We proposed both a deterministic and stochastic approach. The integer programming method is provided to minimize the total number of flights assigned to the belt carousel under the realistic constraint of minimizing the luggage load on each belt carousel. Simulation tools were used so that the offloading process could be modeled to study the effects of various parameters such as the number of ground handling agents for different flights with different amounts of luggage.