Research Project

Airport apron operations contribute to CO2 and noise emissions of the air transport system. Battery-powered electric vehicles, such as electrically operated apron buses, can be used to reduce these emissions. Various options are possible for charging these vehicles. One solution is the classic conductive charging technology. However, this technology leads to large batteries and long downtimes for the vehicles. An alternative is the dynamic inductive charging of the vehicles. In this case, the charging technology is installed under the vehicles' roadway to enable the vehicles to be charged while they are in motion. This leads to the question of how and where the necessary components of the inductive charging technology can be placed on the apron. The decision can be represented using mathematical optimization models. However, solving real size instances leads to very high computation times. Therefore, the research project investigates the use of Benders decomposition for solving different model formulations.