Automatic assignment of aircraft to gates at a terminal

Abstract The assignment of airplanes to terminal gates should take into account not only the physical constraints of the terminal, but also the incoveniences suffered by the transporter and the travellers when a craft has to be serviced away from the terminal. With this in mind, it is preferable that the number of airplanes assigned to a service area away from the terminal, rather than directly placed at a terminal gate, be minimized. Once this problem has been formulated in the form of a linear programming model with binary variables, a heuristic method is applied to find the best solution.