Designing Dynamic Inductive Charging Infrastructures for Airport Aprons with Multiple Vehicle Types

In the effort to combat climate change, the CO₂ emissions of the aviation sector must be reduced. The traffic caused by numerous types of ground vehicles on airport aprons currently contributes to those emissions as the vehicles typically operate with combustion engines, which is why an electrification of those vehicles has already begun. While stationary conductive charging of the vehicles is the current standard technology, dynamic wireless charging might be an attractive technological alternative, in particular for airport aprons; however, designing a charging network for an airport apron is a challenging task with important technical and economic aspects. In this paper, we propose a model to characterize the problem, especially for cases of multiple types of vehicles sharing the same charging network, such as passenger buses and baggage vehicles. In a numerical study inspired by real-world airports, we design such charging networks subject to service level constraints and evaluate the resulting structures via a discrete-event simulation, and thus, show the way to assess the margin of safety with respect to the vehicle batteries’ state of charge that is induced by the spatial structure of the charging network.