Management Information Systems

This book addresses issues related to resource allocation, scheduling and routing in Airport Ground Handling (GH), which involves proper allocation of a number of resources including combinations of workers and vehicles to aircraft of different service requirements and specifications. This allocation consists of assigning specialised teams of skilled workers and special purpose vehicles to serve aircraft on the air-side area, while the routing is to determine the optimal route for vehicles to use. The allocation, scheduling and routing tasks are affected by a number of constraints such as the different aircraft types and sizes available and the different aircraft service times. Thus, the main aim of this book is to develop an autonomous IT system to deal with the allocation and routing of GH resources. The methodology followed involves the use of business intelligence to achieve efficiency in performance, economy, optimization and cost effectiveness. A system with a friendly graphical user interface is developed to test the efficiency of the proposed methodology. The simulation results have shown a net decrease in the service time and an overall team utilisation of 92%.