The enhancement of Passenger Ground Transfer Management by the BPMN modeling and Real-Time Flight Data

Passenger ground transfer involves managing the movement of fleets of vehicles to shuttle passengers between airports and hotels. A persistent challenge and source of operational inefficiency in this environment is deadheading - driving an empty vehicle to pick up passengers. In this paper, we describe a Decision Support System (DSS) to optimally assign transfer routes. The DSS is modeled using BPMN 2.0 and uses real-time flight data, regulatory constraints, and geo-specific information to minimize the number of deadheading kilometers driven. The decision engine provides optimized driver assignment suggestions (ordered by the best option), which the dispatchers can then accept or reject. We validated our system with a real-world dataset of 987,342 transfers collected from a commercial service operating 734 transfer companies in Greece, Cyprus, and Belgium, where 3,700 vehicles and 5,400 drivers were registered. We found that the number of deadheading kilometers per transfer was reduced by 23.8%, the transfer cost decreased by 23.8%, driver utilization increased by 7.2 percentage points, and customer waiting times for transfers in the case of a flight delay decreased by 45.2%. The use of the DSS also reduced the dispatcher workload (on average by an estimated 5.1 hours per day) by offering automated suggestions.