First of all, I really want to thank the developers for such a wonderful game. And I really enjoyed the new features such as remote stands and runway turn off, makes the game so much more realistic.
But with the remote stands and baggage services, vehicle behaviour become much more of a factor for delays, especially for the medium stands. There are 2 issues here that I really hope the Fredrik and Olof can fix in the future updates.
1st issue is the job scheduling of bus and services vehicles. For example, for pushback trucks, is it possible for them to prioritize a job base on the turnaround time left?
One problem I have is that the push back truck is attached to an aircraft that has finished boarding but still got more than 30-60 mins left before the scheduled departure time, but then that aircraft won’t move because of the path reservation for other aircrafts is so long. So now I am out of push back trucks because the trucks are busy pushing other aircraft, but then the aircraft that’s suppose to depart first doesn’t have a push back truck because it finished boarding late (but still finished boarding like 20 mins before STD).
I think this problem can be solved by simply adding a restriction to the AI, simply prevent the push back truck from accepting any job that’s got more than 30 minutes to STD. This will make the game more realistic as well, in real world, aircraft are usually not allowed to push back more than 15 minutes early, unless approved by ATC.
The other issue with the job AI is the airport bus. I have 6 bus stops, but the bus won’t go to the one with most passenger, instead, they will go to the same stand over and over again, allowing pax to pile up at one stand while the bus will just go to the stand with no one queuing.
2nd is the pathfinding of vehicles, I know that Fredrik and Olof is aware of the problem, as in this post Fredrik acknowledge the problem. Since this is back in Feb 2017, I am hoping you guys can get around to the issue as this will become a problem with more and more vehicle is required in the game. But so far they haven’t really cause any major delays yet, not as much as the push back truck anyway.