  Reducing the number of contacts between passengers on an airplane can
potentially curb the spread of infectious diseases. In this paper, a social
force based pedestrian movement model is formulated and applied to evaluate the
movement and contacts among passengers during boarding and deplaning of an
airplane. Within the social force modeling framework, we introduce location
dependence on the self-propelling momentum of pedestrian particles. The model
parameters are varied over a large design space and the results are compared
with experimental observations to validate the model. This model is then used
to assess the different approaches to minimize passenger contacts during
boarding and deplaning of airplanes. We find that smaller aircrafts are
effective in reducing the contacts between passengers. Column wise deplaning
and random boarding are found to be two strategies that reduced the number of
contacts during passenger movement, and can potentially lower the likelihood of
infection spread.
