Institute of Transportation, MOTC

　　Flight delay not only results in additional operating costs at an airport but also deteriorates the service for airline passengers. “Turnaround time” is an important indicator for measuring the operation efficiency, and passen-ger-boarding time is the key factor that affects the turnaround time, therefore, the quality of boarding strategy is the key for fast passenger boarding. Due to different aircraft cabin designs affecting the drawing up of passenger boarding strategy, this paper focused on the passenger boarding strategy for “wide-body aircraft” for further research. Efficient boarding of passengers can reduce the turnaround time, increase operational efficiency of an airline, and also shorten the wait and boarding time of passengers. In this paper, we extended the model developed by van den Briel et al. to the application of the wide-body aircraft boarding strategy problem. The extended model was formulated as a non-linear BIP problem and validated with some small numerical examples. We proposed a new aircraft-boarding strategy termed the “Asymmetrical Reverse Pyramid (ARP)”. We also applied the ARP strategy to both the Boeing 747-400 and the Airbus A320 aircrafts, and compared it with recently developed boarding strate-gies, such as back-to-front (BF), outside-inside (OI), and reverse pyramid (RP). Results showed that the ARP strategy is more efficient and robust than other strategies tested.