Truck scheduling for ground to air connectivity

A critical link in the overnight package business is the on-time arrival of trucks at airport terminals. Truck delays can delay the package sorting and transfer process, which can in turn delay aircraft departures from the local terminal, as well as aircraft departures from hub terminals that depend on timely aircraft arrivals. This paper models the airport terminal as a queueing process with random bulk arrivals. Predictions are provided for expectation, and standard deviation, of arrived work. From these predictions performance measures are developed for sort end time and sort starvation. Particular attention is given to scheduling the start time for the sorting process, to balance a trade-off between maximizing sort productivity and minimizing the end time of the sort. The methods are being implemented as a web-based scheduling tool. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.