The Baggage Belt Assignment Problem

We consider the problem of assigning flights to baggage belts in reclaim area an airport. The is originated by a real-life application Copenhagen objective construct robust schedule taking passenger and airline preferences into account. number business fairness constraints, avoiding congestion, ensuring good flow. Robustness solutions achieved matching delivery time with expected arrival passengers, adding sufficient buffer between two scheduled on same belt. denote this as Baggage Belt Assignment Problem (BBAP). first derive general Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation for problem. Then, we propose Branch-and-Price (B&P) algorithm based reformulation ILP model tackled Column Generation. Our approach relies effective dynamic programming handling pricing problems. tested proposed set data from airport well instances inspired real data. B&P scheme outperforms commercial solver launched delivering high quality limited computational times, making it possible use solution daily operations medium-sized large airports.