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Improving the efficiency of check-in counters is a significant concern for airport operation management departments and airline companies. However, the existing studies mainly optimize the counter allocation based on the number of counters and airport demands, which needs more exploration on improving the utilization rate of check-in counters under the condition of unchanged resource allocation. In this paper, we propose a counter-sharing method to improve check-in efficiency by sharing the idle check-in counters in the adjacent check-in area. In the proposed counter-sharing method, we first define the passenger’s total walking distance and waiting time for queues as the metrics, then reassign the check-in areas and adjust the internal departure sequence of flights to maximize the counter-sharing rate. The numerical results indicate that the proposed counter-sharing method can improve the efficiency of check-in counters and reduce the passenger’s total walking distance and waiting time in the queue during the check-in process, which can enhance the airport’s operation efficiency and competitiveness.

Once the gate of one departure flight needs to be reassigned, the passengers of this flight should move from the original gate to an alternative gate, which will affect the passengers’ motions near the boarding gates involved in the gate transfer process (e.g., the motion trajectory, the motion time, and so on). Therefore, it is necessary to study the impacts of gate reassignment on passengers’ motions and provide some reasonable suggestions for gate reassignment. However, it is not easy to describe large-scale passengers’ complex dynamic nonlinear interactions, especially involving passengers carrying luggage. Thus, we propose an extended social force (SF) model to describe each passenger’s motion when the flight’s gate is temporarily transferred to one alternative gate, where the proposed model has explicitly considered the interactions among the adjacent passengers and between the passengers and their luggage. The simulation results illustrate that the passengers’ motion directions, the number of passengers with carried luggage, and the passengers’ contact distances will affect the passengers’ motion efficiency during the gate transfer process. In addition, based on the simulation results, we propose some suggestions for gate reassignment from the perspective of the passengers’ motion efficiency, where the suggestions can help administrators better reassign boarding gates.

The reasonable boarding strategy can enhance the efficiency, so how to enhance the boarding efficiency has been a hot topic in the air transportation. In this paper, we incorporate the luggage quantity and the passenger’s group behavior into the boarding model, and develop an extended strategy to explore each passenger’s boarding behavior and the influences of the proposed strategy on the boarding efficiency. The numerical results indicate that the proposed strategy can relieve the congestions at the wicket and in the cabin, eliminate the seat conflicts, and reduce the time of handling luggage and the boarding time. This shows that the proposed strategy can enhance the boarding efficiency. The results can help administrators organize the boarding pattern to enhance the efficiency.