Column Generation for Outbound Baggage Handling at Airports

Markus Frey (1) , Rainer Kolisch (1, 2) , Christian Artigues (3)

1 TUM - Technische Universität Munchen - Technical University Munich - Université Technique de Munich
2 ISE - Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering [NCSU]
3 LAAS-ROC - Équipe Recherche Opérationnelle, Optimisation Combinatoire et Contraintes

The planning of outbound baggage handling at international airports is challenging. Outgoing flights have to be assigned and scheduled to handling facilities at which the outgoing baggage is loaded into containers. To avoid disruptions of the system the objective is to minimize workload peaks over the entire system. The resource demand of the jobs, which have to be scheduled, is depending on the arrival process of the baggage. In this paper we present a time-indexed mathematical programming formulation for planning the outbound baggage. We propose an innovative decomposition procedure in combination with a column generation scheme to solve practical problem instances. The decomposition significantly reduces the symmetry effect in the time-indexed formulation and also speeds up the computational time of the corresponding Dantzig-Wolfe formulation. To further improve our column generation algorithm we propose state-of-the-art acceleration techniques for the primal problem and pricing problem. Computational results based on real data from a major European Airport show that the proposed procedure reduces the maximal workloads by more than 60% in comparison to the current assignment procedure used.

Mots clés: binary programming; column generation; outbound baggage handling; cutting planes

Domaines: Recherche opérationnelle [math.OC]

Markus Frey, Rainer Kolisch, Christian Artigues. Column Generation for Outbound Baggage Handling at Airports. Transportation Science, 2017, 35p. ⟨10.1287/trsc.2017.0739⟩. ⟨hal-01614391⟩