A Simulation-Driven Approach For A Cost Efficient Airport Wheelchair Assistance Service

Although roughly 0.6% of the US population is wheelchair-bound, the strain of travel is such that, according to some estimations, more than twice that amount relies on wheelchairs in airports [5]. Even those who have their own chairs still rely on airlines for assistance when making connections. For airlines to provide this service effectively, they must find a way to skirt the boundary between doing too much and doing too little. Many factors are under the company’s control: the maintenance schedule for the wheelchairs, the amount of seasonal hiring to meet the holiday rush, etc. Ultimately, though, two issues have the greatest impact on the cost and effectiveness of their service: how many wheelchairs they should have, and how they should be deployed. These are the focus of this study. If an airline has too few wheelchairs or employees to move them, they will not be able to reach all passengers with enough time to make it to their flights on time. If they delay the flight for these passengers, costs are incurred in terms of lost time. If a flight must leave without a passenger who needed to be escorted, the passenger must be reimbursed, and, if such an occurence is routine, the reputation of the company suffers. On the other hand, if an airline has grossly over-estimated the demand for assistance, they will lose money spent on the wages of idle escorts and on superfluous wheelchairs. The cost of a wheelchair is greater than just the initial purchase price: they must be maintained, and because space is at a premium at an airport, the cost of storing them is also non-trivial. In developing a method of deployment, tending to the extremes is equally ill-advised. If the escorts had to determine their own movements about the airport, the lack of coordination would result in areas of the airport going unattended. The fluctuation of requests could be so great, though, that a plan which gives each escort a territory could both overand under-work escorts in different areas. Air travel is non-uniform to such a degree that the proper number of escorts and wheelchairs is not only a question of the airport but of the volume of passengers, which can vary greatly. In this study, we present an algorithm for the scheduling of the movement of escorts which is both simple in implementation and effective in maximizing the use of available time in each escort’s schedule. Then, given the implementation of this algorithm, we simulate the scheduling of requests in a given airport to find the number of wheelchair/escort pairs that minimizes cost.