A quantitative assessment of the impact of flight delays on the scheduling of airport ground service staff

Scheduling of airport ground service staff is critical to airline ground operations. When scheduling ground service staff, as well as flight crew, airlines use published flight schedules as primary inputs to determine the manpower demand at different times of a day. Flight delays, which are part of actual flight operations and cannot be fully avoided by airlines, are usually not considered during the scheduling stage. In actual flight operations, however, the presence of flight delays will create disruptions to flight operations, thus affecting the scheduling of ground service staff. Using Integer Programming (IP), this study compared the manpower plan made during the planning stage and the actual manpower plan as required on the day of operations to quantitatively assess discrepancies between the two plans. The comparison will enable airlines to understand the impact of flight delays on ground operations more accurately. Results of the present study will also be used as a basis to build a robust manpower scheduling plan for airport ground service staff, which will mitigate the impact of flight delays on ground operations.