Towards solving the airport ground workforce dilemma: A literature review on hiring, scheduling, retention, and digitalization in the airport industry

The airport ground workforce is critical for a smooth operation of the entire aviation industry. This fact has been embarrassingly exposed during the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic in Summer 2022, when various airlines and airports had to cut flights to reduce excessive delays, lost luggage, and other downstream effects, in absence of ground workforce sufficient to handle the rising travel demands. Our study discusses the challenges inherent to solving this airport ground workforce dilemma, partially caused and amplified by excessive layoffs during the peak of COVID-19. These industry challenges are dissected into four categories: Hiring new talents, workforce scheduling, staff retention, and digitalization. For each challenge, we review the existing literature on the subject and discuss potential avenues for solving the existing airport ground workforce dilemma. Our review covers more than 100 papers from the highly scattered literature on the subject and, accordingly, we believe that our study may serve as a starting point for coordinated efforts by the scientific community to tackle this challenging problem.