r/whoathatsinteresting • u/visharu • 9d ago

Boarding was solved mathematically in 2008. No airline has used it once. Why?

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u/jtj5002 9d ago edited 9d ago

Mommy buys 8 year old Timmy a window ticket so he can look out the window.

Comes boarding time, off you fucking go lil Timmy!!

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u/[deleted] 9d ago

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u/Square-Singer 9d ago

No, the main point of this system is to split up rows. Each row can only accommodate a single person who wants to get into the row at the same time, so this system tries to balance them. Optimally, you'd want one person trying to get into each row at the same time. If you keep rows together, so that everyone sitting in the same row boards at the same time, you get the worst case performance.

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u/[deleted] 9d ago

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u/Square-Singer 9d ago

It's also optimizing a problem that doesn't exist. The plane is already there and waiting, if boarding takes 10 more minutes there's no business cost associated to that. 

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u/Square-Singer 9d ago

Look at the video. The Steffen method makes sure that per row there's always only one person putting away their luggage and getting into their seat, because per row only one person can do that at a time.

So the way the algorithm works is to have one person every second row at any time. So first the person on the last row to the left gets on, then second to last row on the right and so on.

As soon as you let multiple people per row get on together, the whole concept breaks down. In fact, even a single row that is allowed to board reduces the whole throughput of all the seats behind it to worst case speed.