Optimizing gate assignments at airport terminals

The assignment of aircraft arriving on schedule to available gates is a major issue during the daily airline operations. The Gate Assignment Problem (GAP) is an easily-understood but difficult to solve problem. An important issue in GAP is to minimize the distance a passenger is required to walk inside the terminal to reach his or her departure gate. The total passenger walking distance is based on the passenger transfer volume between every pair of aircrafts and the distance between every pair of gates. Therefore, the problem of assigning gates to arriving and departing flights at an airport is a Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP), which is a difficult problem to solve. Recently, integer programming (IP), simulation, and expert systems have been applied to the GAP. A new integer programming formulation of the gate assignment problem is presented. An efficient heuristic solution procedure for solving the problem is also proposed. The performance of this solution approach is evaluated in a variety of test problems, and is compared to the optimal solutions obtained using CPLEX in certain test problems. The proposed heuristic solution approach proves to be an efficient method for obtaining good solutions for large scale gate assignment problems in a very reasonable computation time.

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