Related papers: Absent-minded passengers
We offer a formula for the probability distribution of the number of misseated airplane passengers resulting from the presence of multiple absent-minded passengers, given the number of seats available and the number of absent-minded…
In a delightful article that recently appeared in the American Mathematics Monthly, Norbert Henze and Guenter Last discuss the "Absent-Minded Passengers" Problem, but left open finding an explicit expression for the probability generating…
The reader is reminded of several puzzles involving randomness. These may be ill-posed, and if well-posed there is sometimes a solution that uses probabilistic intuition in a special way. Various examples are presented including the well…
I present and discuss a model for the free-for-all passenger boarding which is employed by some discount air carriers. The model is based on the principles of statistical mechanics where each seat in the aircraft has an associated energy…
Empty buses are standing at a bus station. $n$ passengers arrive, and they each board a bus completely at random (meaning that they choose uniformly and independently). Then all buses depart. We show that the more buses there are, the more…
Airlines use different boarding policies to organize the queue of passengers waiting to enter the airplane. We analyze three policies in the many-passenger limit by a geometric representation of the queue position and row designation of…
We study airplane boarding in the limit of large number of passengers using geometric optics in a Lorentzian metric. The airplane boarding problem is naturally embedded in a 1+1 dimensional space-time with a flat Lorentzian metric. The…
Reducing the aircraft boarding time is a common problem not only for airlines, but also for passengers and airports. Group boarding is a popular boarding strategy that separates the passengers into several groups and those groups, which are…
Using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo optimization algorithm and a computer simulation, I find the passenger ordering which minimizes the time required to board the passengers onto an airplane. The model that I employ assumes that the time that…
A team of anonymous mobile agents represented by points freely moving in the plane have to gather at a single point and stop. Agents start at different points of the plane and at possibly different times chosen by the adversary. They are…
Gathering is a fundamental task for multi-agent systems and the problem has been studied under various assumptions on the sensing capabilities of mobile agents. This paper addresses the problem for a group of agents that are identical and…
We show that airplane boarding can be asymptotically modeled by 2-dimensional Lorentzian geometry. Boarding time is given by the maximal proper time among curves in the model. Discrepancies between the model and simulation results are…
A fixed number of passengers independently board one of several buses uniformly at random. The lonely passenger problem is to prove that the probability of at least one passenger being the only one in their bus is increasing in the number…
The severity of natural disasters is increasing every year, impacting many people's lives. During the response phase of disasters, airports are important hubs where relief aid arrives and people need to be evacuated. However, the airport…
Consider a theatre consisting of $m$ rows each containing $n$ seats. Theatregoers enter the theatre along aisles and pick a row which they enter along one of its two entrances so as to occupy a seat. Assume they select their seats uniformly…
This paper reconsiders the problem of the absent-minded driver who must choose between alternatives with different payoff with imperfect recall and varying degrees of knowledge of the system. The classical absent-minded driver problem…
Airplane boarding process is an example where disorder properties of the system are relevant to the emergence of universality classes. Based on a simple model, we present a systematic analysis of finite-size effects in boarding time, and…
Two mobile agents represented by points freely moving in the plane and starting at two distinct positions, have to meet. The meeting, called rendezvous, occurs when agents are at distance at most $r$ of each other and never move after this…
The long waiting time at airport security has become an emergent issue as demand for air travel continues to grow. Not only does queuing at security cause passengers to miss their flights, but also reduce the amount of time passengers spend…
The timely handling of passengers is critical to efficient airport and airline operations. The pandemic requirements mandate adapted process designs and handling procedures to maintain and improve operational performance. Passenger…