An analysis of constructive algorithms for the airport baggage sorting station assignment problem

The appropriate assignment of airport resources can greatly affect the quality of service which airlines and airports provide to their customers. Good assignments can help airlines and airports keep to published schedules by minimising changes or delays while waiting for resources to become available. In this paper, we consider a resource allocation problem, namely the problem of assigning available baggage sorting stations to flights which have already been scheduled and allocated to stands. A description and model for the problem are presented, illustrating the different objectives which have to be considered. A number of constructive algorithms for sorting station assignments are then presented and their effects are compared and contrasted when different numbers of sorting stations are available. In particular, it can be observed that the appropriate algorithm selection is highly dependent upon whether or not reductions in service time are permitted and upon the flight density in relation to the number of sorting stations. Finally, since these constructive approaches produce different solutions which are better for different tradeoffs of the objectives, we utilise these as initial solutions for an evolutionary algorithm as well as for an Integer Amadeo Ascó School of Computer Science University of Nottingham E-mail: [email protected] Dr. Jason A. D. Atkin School of Computer Science University of Nottingham E-mail: [email protected] Prof. Edmund K. Burke Department of Computing and Mathematics University of Stirling E-mail: [email protected] Linear Programming (ILP) model in CPLEX. We show that in both cases they are helpful for improving the results which are obtainable within reasonable solution times.