A simulation to test plane boarding methodologies in your terminal

After watching a wonderfully informative and entertaining video on the frustrations of the existing methodologies for boarding a plane, I decided to build a simulation to model some of the methodologies to the test

• Node 11.0+ Due to V8 7.0 bringing a stable sort implementation to Array.sort
  • Request: use lodash sortby() to circumvent stable sort issue

Boarding Simulator runs in your terminal and uses a json file to configure the simulation. Run node ./dist/index.js to run the simulation with the default configuration Pass in a path to a configuration json to use those settings: node ./dist/index.js path/to/my/settings.json

passengerCount: number

Number of passengers that will be assigned seats. Will be limited to the maximum seats available

rows: number

Number of seat rows in the plane

columnsPerSide: number

Number of seat columns per side of the plane. Ex: 3 columnsPerSide = 6 columns total

boardingGroups: number

Number of boarding groups to divide the rows by

stepsBerBag: number

Number of steps it takes to stow a single bag

bagMin: number

Minimum number of bags that a passenger may carry

bagMax: number

Maximum number of bags that a passenger may carry

seatShufflePenalty: number

Steps it takes for a person to bypass an already seated passenger to get to assigned seat

sortStrategyName: string

Strategy to sort passengers by. See Sorting Strategies for a list of available strategies

showRowNumbers: boolean

showColumnNumbers: boolean

showBoardingGroups: boolean

(not implemented)

showLog: boolean

(not implemented)

animate: boolean

Sets the simulation mode.

• true Animation mode
• false Average mode

simulationRuns: number

Times that the simulation will be run. Only used when in Average mode, i.e animate: false

fps: number

Framerate of the simulation. Only used when in Animation mode, i.e animate: true

alternatingRows

backToFront

backToFrontRow

bySide

fastest

frontToBack

frontToBackRow

isleToWindow

random

slowest

windowToIsle

The simulator can run in two distinct modes:

Animation mode: Runs a single simulation and displays an animation in the terminal

Average mode: Runs the simulation without animating then returns an summary of all simulations run. Runs the simulation as many times as provided by the provided siumulationRuns value

TBD