­Journal article about technology-based distance determination for boarding processes under COVID-19 conditions

In addition to our everyday life, corona pandemic also has a considerable impact on a large number of traffic processes.

Passenger-related air traffic is particularly affected, as global travel activities can lead to infection chains which are difficult or impossible to trace. The processes during passenger handling (e.g. boarding and deboarding) and during the flight take place in limited space, which can lead to an increased risk of infection.

In addition to distance rules and hygiene concepts, we also see great potential in the use of technology-supported approaches to reduce the risk of infection to a minimum, e.g. through active warning systems or digital contact tracking. These systems are usually based on the acquisition of spatial relations between users (e.g. distance). A major challenge of such wireless technologies is the susceptibility of the distance determination to ambient interference, which can lead to considerable measurement errors, especially in radio challenging scenarios such as the aircraft cabin (see figure 2). This is accompanied by the potential to detect both "false positive" and "false negative" distance underruns and interactions, which degrades both reliability and acceptance of these approaches.

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The journal article "Evaluation of Technology-Supported Distance Measuring to Ensure Safe Aircraft Boarding during COVID-19 Pandemic" (Open Access) is dedicated to this current and fundamental problem. It is the result of an internal, inter-institute cooperation between the Chair of Transport Systems Information Technology and the Chair of Air Transportation Technology and Logistics. This trend-setting cooperation ensures the scientific and technical synergy between operational and information technology processes in the aircraft cabin.

The systematic optimization of seat allocation and the sequence of passenger boarding and disembarking, taking into account distance regulations, shows the possibilities of improved procedural processes (see figure 1).

However, these and other location-based functionalities can only be realized if necessary technical support systems of a connected cabin are actively integrated (see figure 3).

© ITVS

In this publication, the necessary foundations for the connected cabin are created and illustrated by a radio propagation simulation within a 3D-modelled aircraft cabin. The complexity and challenges of radio-based distance acquisition are specifically addressed and the effects on distance measurement in terms of the COVID-19 pandemic requirements are discussed.

Building on this promising cooperation between the two professorships, the topic of the connected cabin will be intensively researched in a joint research agenda.

A short video summary of the article is also available on Youtube!