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December 13, 2005
The Best Way to Board a Plane
News@Nature.com has an article that I found abnormally interesting. Eitan Bachmat a mathematician at Ben-Gurion University in Israel has been working on the problem of how to reduce the time required to get passengers on a plane. The airlines are all for reducing this time. Doing so translates into increased profits. Here's a few snippets from the article.
To try to improve the efficiency of the boarding process, aerospace companies such as Boeing use computer simulations in which each passenger takes their seat after performing activities such as helping family members and stowing carry-on baggage. Bachmat and colleagues, in contrast, have posed the problem in terms of permutations: the different orders in which passengers might board, which determines your chances of getting blocked by someone seated closer to the door.The mathematics of permutations gets pretty hairy, involving concepts such as 'two-dimensional Lorentz geometry' and 'random matrix theory' that are likely to boggle airline companies.
Heavy stuff usually reserved for relativity theory and the like.
The researchers say that their model predicts boarding times similar to those given by simulations - even though the latter include complicating factors such as slow-moving passengers, full overhead bins, and people sitting in the wrong place.And their model doesn't demand detailed assumptions about the size and shape of an aircraft. Instead, it depends primarily on the seating plan. "If you wanted to design a plane for easy boarding, our model would be easier to apply", says Bachmat's colleague Steve Skiena of the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
The researchers find that boarding passengers with window seats first is more efficient than filling the plane from the back, which creates a lot of blocking. Uncontrolled boarding - adopted by airlines such as Southwest in the United States and EasyJet in the UK - is also relatively efficient.
Most efficient of all would be to avoid all blocking by boarding passengers in a strict sequence, seat by seat. But most people don't like to be controlled to that extent, says Skiena. "Airlines would like to turn around their planes as quickly as possible," he says. "But they don't want to annoy their passengers."
Well, based on my experience and with no modeling at all, I know an even better way.
Some years ago, I spent a good deal of time traveling to and from Japan. I would also need to travel back and forth from Tokyo to Osaka frequently on a "shuttle," actually a 747 set up to hold around 400(!) people, perhaps more. The boarding procedure was simple. They would call the flight and everyone would get on the plane in about ten minutes or less through two ramps. You knew from your seat assignment which ramp to take. The only rule was "be polite" and don't try to get there first. It worked great.
Perhaps this is what "uncontrolled" boarding means.
Via 3quarksdaily
Posted by DuaneSmith at December 13, 2005 07:23 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
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