In September 2003, America West Airlines implemented a new aircraft boarding strategy that reduces the airline’s average passenger boarding time by over two minutes, or approximately 20 percent, for full and nearly full flights. The strategy, developed by a team of Arizona State University and America West Airline’s personnel, is a hybrid between traditional back-to-front boarding and outside-inside boarding used by other airlines. Field observations, numerical results of analytical models, and simulation studies provided information that resulted in an improved aircraft-boarding strategy termed reverse pyramid. With the new boarding strategy, passengers still have personal seat assignments, but rather than boarding by rows from the back to the front of the airplane, they board in groups minimizing expected passenger interference in the airplane. The analytical, simulation, and implementation results obtained show that the method represents a significant improvement in terms of boarding time over traditional pure back-to-front, outside-inside boarding strategies.
At utilization levels higher than SO%, the cycle time becomes too large, which results in lower yield and hence lower throughput. Table I also contains similar calculations when the defect rate is lowered to 1/80, Since defects are appearing on the wafer at a slower rate, this case results in higher yield. The capacity of this system is 0.8, which is achieved by utilizing the system 90% of the time. The curve of mean cycle time versus throughput rate for both of these examples is displayed in Fig. 2. In both curves, the throughput rate decreases at higher congestion levels, although the effect is more pronounced in the higher defect rate (i.e., lower yield) case.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.