Fall 2007 Seminar Series

DATE: September 20
LOCATION: E40-298
TIME: 4:15pm
Reception immediately following in the ORC ConferenceRoom, E40-106

SPEAKER:
Eitan Bachmat

TITLE
Airplane Boarding

ABSTRACT
Its hard to think of a process that is more boring than boarding an airplane. In the hope of relieving, or at least shortening, some of the pain, airlines have devised various boarding strategies which lead to announcements like "All passenger from rows 40 and above are now welcome to board the plane, or more recently, "Zone 1+2 passengers are now welcome to board", or even unassigned boarding. We will prsent an analytical model for airplane boarding and try to figure out what are the better strategies. On the way we will show that airplane boarding is a very exciting process. Partly based on joint works with D. Berend, L. Sapir, S. Skiena, M. Elkin and V. Khachaturov.