Journal article
Modular vehicles can reduce greenhouse gas emissions for departure flight baggage transportation
Journal of air transport management, v 119, 102633
01 Aug 2024
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
Rapid and on-time baggage transportation plays a crucial role in ensuring customer satisfaction and is an important source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the aviation sector. Modular Vehicle (MV) is an emerging transportation technology that allows vehicles to adjust their capacity flexibly by assembling or disassembling identical detachable units. This innovative technology offers a new perspective to decarbonize the aviation sector, as it holds promise for reducing GHG emissions in flight baggage transportation. To investigate this possibility, this study proposes an MV operation paradigm and a corresponding “greenest” MV scheduling problem that aims to minimize MV-relevant GHG emissions while transporting baggage from the terminal to the aircraft without delay. To solve the problem efficiently, a fast construction-merging heuristic is proposed based on the theoretical properties of the problem. A series of case studies at the Tampa International Airport were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed MV operation and the construction-merging heuristic. The results indicate that the proposed MV operation effectively reduces GHG emissions, and the heuristic solves near-optimal solutions to the investigated problem much faster than Gurobi, a state-of-the-art commercial solver for integer programs, without much loss of the optimality of the solutions. Results from this study provide important managerial and operational insights into decarbonizing baggage transportation for airport operators.
•Propose a modular operational paradigm for optimizing greenhouse gas emissions from departure flight baggage transportation.•Discover theoretical properties of feasible solutions to the investigated mixed integer programming model.•Develop an efficient fast construction-merging heuristic algorithm to solve near-optimal solutions.•Verify that the proposed model can effectively reduce the greenhouse gas emissions for baggage transportation.
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Details
- Title
- Modular vehicles can reduce greenhouse gas emissions for departure flight baggage transportation
- Creators
- Xiaowei Shi - University of Wisconsin–MilwaukeeZhiwei Chen (Corresponding Author) - Drexel UniversityXiaopeng Li - University of Wisconsin SystemXiaobo Qu - Tsinghua University
- Publication Details
- Journal of air transport management, v 119, 102633
- Publisher
- Elsevier
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:001260460300001
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85196621255
- Other Identifier
- 991022202506404721
UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
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Source: SDGs in the Output
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- International collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Transportation