Gate Assigment and Fleet Sizing of Apron Buses including social distancing metrics in an international airport using discrete event simulation

The COVID - 19 pandemic has impacted the aeronautical industry demanding new conditions in the transfer of passengers on air flights. These new conditions involve ensuring that passengers can maintain an adequate distance to minimize the chances of contagion. This implies that airports can resize their resources to meet these conditions. It is critical to be able to keep social distancing in the passenger boarding and unboarding processes, then the apron buses and gates used in these processes becomes critical. The bus fleet sizing needs to be calculated considering passengers needs to keep social distancing in their travel from and to the aircrafts. In a similar way gates need to be assigned considering a reduction in the use of neighboring doors to reduce the number of passengers in the same waiting room. The complexity of this problem lies in being able to incorporate the social distancing as an action parameter to obtain adequate solutions in the context of sizing the apron bus fleet and assigning doors. The contagion risk becomes an indicator related to social distancing in the position and movements made in the apron buses. So, it is proposed to incorporate these conditions in a simulation model that allows obtaining the estimation of the apron bus fleet and the allocation of gates as a result while showing the contagion risk as a decision parameter.