Mixed fleet scheduling method for airport ground service vehicles under the trend of electrification

Electric ground support equipment (GSE) has been promoted by airports to reduce carbon emissions, and most airports operate both fuel and electric vehicles. In order to fill the gap in the research of GSE scheduling problem with mixed fleet of fuel vehicles and electric vehicles, this paper establishes a mixed operation model of fuel and electric vehicles with time window with the objective function of minimizing the sum of time cost, energy cost and emission cost, and considers the energy consumption of a new type of electric aircraft towing tractor which have APU substitution function. Then solve it by using a reliable adaptive large neighborhood search algorithm, which improves the quality of the solution through the simulated annealing principle and expansion of the applicability of the adaptive mechanism. Furthermore, 2 scenarios with different characteristics of road network scale, the terminal configuration and flight were constructed on the basis of Nanjing Lukou international airport data, and each scenario have 5 different proportions of fleets in order to reflect the operation characteristics along with the change of electric vehicles proportion. The results show that: (1) Scenario characteristics will affect the optimal fleet allocation strategy; (2) Compared with large airports, small airports have higher emission reduction efficiency and lower energy saving efficiency; (3) Airport ground electrification increases flight delays, especially at smaller airports with a more inflexible network. This study can provide data reference for the optimal fleet configuration in airports with mixed operation with fuel and electric vehicles.