Institute of Transportation, MOTC

     In recent years, the number of airport escorts have gradually increased. How to appropriately assign escorts to traveler requests has become one of the important issues in airport operations. However, the current method of escort assignment is mostly relied on decision makers’ experiences, without a perspective of systematic optimization, usually resulting in inferior assignments with delayed/canceled escorts occasionally, while having waste of manpower sometimes. Therefore, we consider the stochasticity of escort demands and related operating constraints to develop an escort assignment model with stochastic demands, with the objective of minimizing the total expected escort operating cost. It is expected to be useful references for airport authorities or related carriers to effectively perform airport escorts in practice. We employed network flow techniques to construct an escort network and adopt mathematical programming method to establish the model which can be formulated as an integer network flow problem with side constraints. We also adopt a rolling analysis to dynamically assign escorts in operations. To preliminarily evaluate the model, we perform a case study using data from an international airport in Taiwan with a number of sensitivity/scenario analyses. The test results are good, indicating that the model could be useful for airport authorities/related carriers for their practices.