Airport Gate Assignment: New Model and Implementation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new mathematical model for airport gate assignment that minimizes conflicts between aircraft, implemented using Optimization Programming language, and validated with real airline data to improve operational efficiency.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel gate assignment model with logical and binary constraints, implemented in OPL, and demonstrates its effectiveness with real-world data.

Findings

Model reduces gate conflicts effectively

Implementation in OPL is computationally efficient

Experimental results show improved gate assignment evaluation

Abstract

Airport gate assignment is of great importance in airport operations. In this paper, we study the Airport Gate Assignment Problem (AGAP), propose a new model and implement the model with Optimization Programming language (OPL). With the objective to minimize the number of conflicts of any two adjacent aircrafts assigned to the same gate, we build a mathematical model with logical constraints and the binary constraints, which can provide an efficient evaluation criterion for the Airlines to estimate the current gate assignment. To illustrate the feasibility of the model we construct experiments with the data obtained from Continental Airlines, Houston Gorge Bush Intercontinental Airport IAH, which indicate that our model is both energetic and effective. Moreover, we interpret experimental results, which further demonstrate that our proposed model can provide a powerful tool for airline companies to estimate the efficiency of their current work of gate assignment.