Determining Resource Needs of Autonomous Agents in Decoupled Plans

At airports, the turnaround process of aircraft is crucial for a timely and efficient handling of air traffic. During this process, a number of services need to be provided during the time the aircraft is at the gate: e.g., de-boarding, cleaning, catering, fuelling, and boarding. These services are provided by different service providers (agents), who have to coordinate their activities in order to respect the turnaround timeslot, the required service times and existing regulations. These temporal dependencies between services can be planned, but if disruptions occur re-planning is complex and often impossible. For this reason, in previous research a methodology and prototype have been devised to simplify the planning process by decoupling the overall plan into local plans for each agent. This paper builds on this research and introduces an important extension to the existing methodology and prototype: a new algorithm is introduced to take into account the minimal number of resources each service provider will need to accomplish its task