Distributed route choice control in DCV-based baggage handling systems

In this paper we develop advanced control methods for routing individual vehicles which ensure automatic transportation of bags in a baggage handling system of an airport. In particular we consider distributed model predictive control and a distributed heuristic control approach. The baggage handling system performs efficiently if all the bags are transported to the corresponding end points within a specific time window, and this makes the process of handling baggage time-critical. The proposed control approaches are effective for the given application. To assess their performance we consider a benchmark case study, in which the methods are compared for several scenarios. Results indicate that the distributed approaches improve the performance of the vehiclebased baggage handling system with up to 20%.