Airplane Boarding

Yesterday, I posted something about airplane boarding which I pulled immediately because it was just embarrassingly naive. Here's the problem statement in the form of a bad limerick:

On my way to my assigned row,

I was stuck behind a bimbo, 

In the overhead bin she's trying  to stow

A bag weighed at least 50 kilos.

That's just the beginning of my woes, 

A passenger I didn't even know,

Struggling to his seat by the window, 

Put all his weight on my poor little toe.

Wouldn't it be better if we go,

LIFO instead of FIFO?

At first glance, I thought a Last In First Out (LIFO) boarding order, i.e., back-to-front, window-to-aisle, would be the most efficient. if we board the plane in the reverse order of how we deplane (which is naturally front-to-back, aisle-to-window), significant time can be saved.

Turns out there are papers published on this very subject, all schemes work about the same and random boarding is actually the quickest in simulation and real life. Any kind of zone/group boarding creates localized congestion which cancels out the benefits. This is not too surprising because we see this in engineering all the time, for example, we haven't been able to improve on the efficiency of Ethernet which uses random timing.

Here's a link to one of the studies from University of Colorado, they have pretty cool simulation of different boarding schemes that you can play and watch.

Next time when you're caught boarding the plane before your zone is called, you can sincerely explain to the airline staff that you're just trying to improve efficiency, they found the cheaters (about 10%) do make the zone boarding process slightly faster in another study.