Colloquia

Summary

It is increasingly difficult for airline company KLM to recruit ground personnel for performing their aircraft turnaround operations. As well as the increasing attention to physical strain and exposure to aircraft emissions, led them to explore the possibilities of implementing autonomous agents into their turnaround operations. Aircraft turnaround operations are the operations that take place between when the aircraft arrives and departs at the gate, like refuelling and baggage handling. This is a task that is done in a dynamic environment which also requires multiple members of the ground personnel to complete. Implementing an autonomous system into this operation would require the ground personnel to work together with these agents. To be able to perform tasks around or even interacting with the aircraft, the ability of localization with regard to the aircraft is also important for the functioning of the autonomous agent.

Best practices regarding the human interaction and localization in the context of aircraft turnaround operations were researched and put into a workflow. This workflow guides the development of autonomous agents in terms of human interaction and localization. It indicates that for human interaction, Situation Awareness Oriented Design should be performed. This minimizes the impact of the implementation of autonomous agents on the situation awareness of the ground personnel, which if decreased could have a negative effect on performance and safety. For localization, synthetic map-based localization should be performed, using a 3d model of the arriving aircraft as a base.

A case study was done to test this workflow where an autonomous wheel chocking robot was developed, along with a prototype. This prototype was used to show what is possible regarding autonomous turnaround operations and to find out what hurdles you encounter when you want to implement such a system.