The Passengers’ Motion Behaviours during the Gate Transfer Process: Models and Analysis

Once the gate of one departure flight needs to be reassigned, the passengers of this flight should move from the original gate to an alternative gate, which will affect the passengers’ motions near the boarding gates involved in the gate transfer process (e.g., the motion trajectory, the motion time, and so on). Therefore, it is necessary to study the impacts of gate reassignment on passengers’ motions and provide some reasonable suggestions for gate reassignment. However, it is not easy to describe large-scale passengers’ complex dynamic nonlinear interactions, especially involving passengers carrying luggage. Thus, we propose an extended social force (SF) model to describe each passenger’s motion when the flight’s gate is temporarily transferred to one alternative gate, where the proposed model has explicitly considered the interactions among the adjacent passengers and between the passengers and their luggage. The simulation results illustrate that the passengers’ motion directions, the number of passengers with carried luggage, and the passengers’ contact distances will affect the passengers’ motion efficiency during the gate transfer process. In addition, based on the simulation results, we propose some suggestions for gate reassignment from the perspective of the passengers’ motion efficiency, where the suggestions can help administrators better reassign boarding gates.