Baggage dissociation for sustainable air travel: Design study of ground baggage distribution networks

Dissociation of passenger travel from baggage delivery has been proposed as one of the radical innovations in future air travel. This concept is still relatively new and largely unexplored, so there are many issues that need to be resolved. For instance, a complete end-to-end baggage dissociation will require the ground distribution networks to deliver passenger luggage to and from the departing and arriving airports. This paper proposes to design such networks as the existing parcel delivery networks. In particular, baggage sorting centers (BSCs) can serve as local hubs for creasing a scalable, multi-level topology of the delivery network in order to manage baggage flows in a given geographical area around the selected airports. Assuming the population density as a proxy for estimating the baggage delivery service demands, the optimum locations of BSCs are determined by formulating and solving the standard p-median and the maximal covering location problems. The numerical results were obtained for Greater London, and also for the whole UK assuming all its major civilian airports. The Greater London area could be served by 36 BSCs to achieve a full service coverage. The 90% service coverage of the whole UK can be achieved by about the same number of BSCs, provided that the coverage distance is increased. In practice, the actual number of required BSCs crucially depends on the operational and capital costs, and the maximum processing capacity of each BSC. These findings have direct implications on the long-term planning and innovations in future air transport.