The Network Flow of Flying
Flying is a pain. Between security checks, waiting at the terminal, the lengthy boarding process and numerous other time consuming activities, you waste hours of travel time before you even get in the air. What if there was a way to reduce some of this time? Physicist Jason Steffen has found a way to cut boarding time in half by looking at the network flow of plane boarding.
In class we have looked at network flow of cars on roadways, packets of data on the internet, and the paths planes take between cities, but the boarding of a plane is similar. People are still moving from point A (the terminal) to point B (their seats) using pathways (aisles).The more people who try to board at one time, the slower the process is because of the congested aisles, much like the x/100 trend we discussed for traffic on road ways (where x is the number of people and the time grows as the number of people increase). Currently airlines board in blocks, calling one set of seats and then the next. In experiments Steffen found this was one of the slowest ways to board. This makes sense with what we have seen. The more people trying to use the same aisle, or edge, the more the time it takes. If people could take different routes, such as boarding alternate rows, or boarding only window seats and then middle seats, the aisle traffic and therefore the x/100 time would be smaller and the process could be expedited. The study found that even randomized boarding is faster than the airlines prescribed way of block boarding.
So if the airlines could cut boarding time in half, why wouldn’t they? Steffen’s original paper was released in 2008, but no major airline has adapted this new technique which is estimated to save $110,000,000 annually per carrier. We can look at this as a multi-player game. The players are the major airlines and the strategies are implementing or not implementing a new boarding system. Payoffs require a little thought though, while $110M per carrier/year is a chunk of change and the halving of wait time is great for customer service, they are not the only payoffs to be considered. Changing of procedure, retraining of staff at every terminal and the confusion of the passengers during the first few weeks of the implementation could all negatively impact the success of the airline. If the status quo is working well now, why risk the loss of money due to retraining and loss passengers due to frustration with a potentially confusing system for something that no one else is doing. But if one airline switches and the others don’t switch, they may have to play catch up later. The only two Nash Equilibriums in the game would be everyone doing nothing and everyone switching. And it seems like no one is willing to be risky and move forward from the status quo. Guess we’re stuck with long boarding times for a while longer.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20099450-1/physicist-cuts-plane-boarding-time-in-half/?fb_ref=fbrecT&fb_source=profile_oneline