Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

9-2013

Abstract

In this paper we propose a static policy for the optimal allocation of a fixed number of exclusive-use check-in counters dedicated to a single flight. We first provide the motivation for considering the static policy by showing that the dynamic policy already available in the literature suffers from the curse of dimensionality. The objective is to minimize the (expected) total cost of waiting, counter operation, and passenger delay costs which we show to be convex in the number of counters allocated. In those cases where the passenger delay cost is difficult to estimate, we propose an alternative formulation and minimize the operating and waiting costs subject to a probabilistic service-level constraint. This constraint ensures that the probability of all passengers being cleared by the gate closing time exceeds a specific level. Finally, we provide a simple procedure for estimating the implied delay costs by exploiting the properties of the two optimization problems. Compared to the difficult-to-evaluate dynamic policy in other papers in the literature, the present static policy requires only a few function evaluations. This feature of the static policy makes it easy to find the optimal number of counters even when the number of booked passengers is in the hundreds.

Keywords

Transportation, Queues, Airline check-in counters, Static policy, Stochastic models

Discipline

Operations and Supply Chain Management | Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering

Research Areas

Operations Management

Publication

OPSEARCH

Volume

50

Issue

3

First Page

433

Last Page

453

ISSN

0030-3887

Identifier

10.1007/s12597-012-0110-5

Publisher

Springer Verlag

Copyright Owner and License

Publisher

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12597-012-0110-5

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