An environmentally-aware dynamic planning of electric vehicles for aircraft towing considering stochastic aircraft arrival and departure times

Introducing electric vehicles that tow aircraft during taxiing is an emerging technology aimed at supporting climate neutrality for aviation. Planning electric towing operations is, however, impeded by the high uncertainty in aircraft arrival and departure times. We address the question of how to plan the operation of a fleet of Electric Towing Vehicles (ETVs) to maximize environmental benefits, given the uncertainty in aircraft arrival/departure times. For this, we propose a stochastic and dynamic planning framework for ETVs, where stochastic aircraft arrival and departure times are updated during the day. With this, the assignment of the ETVs-to-aircraft to replace conventional taxiing, and ETV battery charging times are planned such that the fuel savings are maximized. At the same time, we ensure that aircraft delays induced by the use of ETVs are minimized. We illustrate our framework for a large European airport. The results show that our framework achieves 79.5% of the highest possible cost reduction (fuel and ETV-induced delay), which is obtained when full knowledge of the arrival/departure times is available in advance. Furthermore, we show that considering the uncertainty in the arrival/departure times, rather than using point estimates of these times, leads to a 17.7% additional cost reduction. Overall, our framework supports the implementation of electric aircraft towing with maximum environmental benefits while considering the dynamic, uncertain arrival and departure times of aircraft.