A Hybrid Ant-Based System for Gate Assignment Problem

This paper presents an ant system coupled with a local search applied to an over-constrained airport gate assignment problem (AGAP). In the airport gate assignment problem we are interested in selecting and allocating aircrafts to the gates such that the total passenger connection time is minimized. Our algorithm uses pheromone trail information to perform modifications on AGAPsolutions, unlike traditional ant systems that use pheromone trail information to construct complete solutions. The algorithm is analyzed and compared with tabu search heuristic and Ant Colony System metaheuristic.