Optimizing Gate Assignments at Airports-zhangchen.pdfVIP

?Optimizing Gate Assignments at Airports Chen ZHANG1 and Pan ZHENG2 1 Institute of Aviation Safety Technology, China Academy of Civil Aviation Science and Technology, 24 Xibahe Beili, Chaoyang district, Beijing, 100028; PH (086) 010 email:?zhangchen@mail.castc.org.cn 2 Institute of Aviation Safety Technology, China Academy of Civil Aviation Science and Technology, 24 Xibahe Beili, Chaoyang district, Beijing, 100028; PH (086) 010 email:bjtu.edu.cn ABSTRACT Airport gate assignment is the process of appointing a gate for the arrival or departure of a flight and ensuring that the flight is on schedule. Assigning the airport gate with high efficiency is a key task among airport ground business. As the core of airport operation, aircraft gate assignment is known as a rather complicated combinatorial optimization problem. In this paper, we consider the over-constrained Airport Gate Assignment Problem where the number of flights exceeds the number of gates available, and where the objective is to minimize the overall variance of slack time. According to the intrinsic characteristics of the objective function itself, we design a meta-heuristic method and simulated annealing to solve the problem. Finally, illustrative examples show the validity of the proposed approach. INTRODUCTION The primary purpose of flight-to-gate assignments in airports is to assign aircraft to gates to meet operational requirements while minimizing the overall variance of slack time periods. The term “gate” is used to designate not only the facility through which passengers pass to board or alight an aircraft but also the parking positions used for servicing a single aircraft. These station operations usually account for a smaller part of the overall cost of an airline’s operations than the flight operations themselves. However, they can have a major impact on the efficiency with which the flight schedules are maintained and on the l