A simulation model to improve air cargo operations in passenger aircraft

In aviation, decision-making process appears almost in any transport related activity: from high level strategic and management decisions like aircraft fleet and routing policies until low level operational decisions as for example handling and balancing the goods in the aircraft. Despite from a functional point of view all these activities can be considered and tackled in an independent way, a modeling approach that could support the specification of the different activities together with their costs, as a high coupled chain of independent operations would contribute to a better understanding of airline industry for reorienting their business model to cope with the new competitive conditions. In this paper we will introduce a simulation model to evaluate the use of the first bay of low-cost carriers (LCCs) to improve their competitivity by embracing cargo operations. The variety of processes, methods, individuals and organizations, in combination with a lack of methodologies to analyze the behavior of the whole airport operation as a combination of the decision taken in each subsystem (ie. handling, airline and airport managers), are one of the main risks that deals with airport and airline delays which have severe cost penalties. In this paper, a causal simulation model platform to improve air cargo performance is presented.