Simulating the Departure Baggage Handling System of Santiago De Chile's International Airport

The baggage handling system (BHS) of the Santiago International Airport, follows a semiautomatic scheme, in which routing and security scanning are performed automatically by the conveyor belts’ system, while the sorting of bags and the loading of carts that are finally located in planes, are performed manually by the operators of the company in charge of the ground handling operations of the airport. Nowadays, the major problems of the operation in the airport are due to uncontrolled simultaneity in the design of flights’ scheduling, which leads to high demand peaks that exceed the system’s designed capacity. This demand has increased notably over the last five years. In addition, there are multiple actors involved in the airport operation (particularity, counter employees and baggage handling personnel) that are neither directly communicated nor coordinated in the process, resulting in operational problems and disruptions due to their narrow visibility over the impact of their actions on the performance of others. Both situations results in poor efficiency. The problems increase due to a declared no interest of investing in major infrastructure until the construction of a new airport planned to 2017. Today the managers are interested in understanding the system as a whole, to make a proper diagnosis and provide useful insights for improvement and coordination in the operation. In order to do that, we need first to identify the bottlenecks in the system and finally explore alternative operation protocols in the baggage handling sector. To accomplish with these goals, we have constructed a micro simulation platform to properly model the whole system as described in detail next.