California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

A critical link in the overnight package business is the on-time arrival of trucks at airport terminals.  Truck delays can delay the package sorting and transfer process, which can in turn delay aircraft departures from the local terminal, as well as aircraft departures from hub terminals that depend on timely aircraft arrivals.  This report models the airport terminal as a queueing process with random bulk arrivals.  The models have been implemented in a web-based decision support tool (Truck to Air Dispatch, TAD, available at the website ger309-pc16.usc.edu), which provides real-time predictions for the status of the sort operation, and decision support for scheduling dispatches.