Research On Gate Assignment Optimization Problem At The Airport

This thesis mainly concerns the gate assignment optimization problem at the airport. The gate assignment optimization problem schedules a number of arriving and departing flights into a set of appropriate gates available at the airport to guarantee the flights run smoothly and satisfy some optimization objectives under the condition of meeting certain constraints. It is a comprehensive managerial problem. The solving of this problem can put an end to the manual management style of gate assignment at most of the airports in our country and realize computerized gate assignment optimization as well as adapt to the rapid development of informatization, so that the equipment utility of airport can be improved and the operation cost can be cut down at the same time save human resources. Therefore airport gate assignment problem is of great research significance and application value.This thesis sums up a lot of relevant references about gate assignment optimization problem both in our country and overseas. Then we do some further research based on previous work. Firstly, with the objective of minimizing the number of gates used, we build up a gate assignment model. By quantifying the contribution of the remaining large, middle and small gate to the objective function, a new graph coloring model base on weighting is used to solve the gate assignment problem. Experiment results consolidated the effectiveness of this method. Secondly, a novel approach named Squeaky Wheel Optimization (SWO) is initially brought in to model and solve the gate assignment problem with the objective of minimizing the average walking distance of passengers at the airport. We prove the feasibility and effectiveness of this approach. Thirdly, we use the robustness of the gate assignment timetable as the objective function and adapt the improved genetic algorithm to tackle with the gate assignment problem. Experimental results confirm this method is practical and effective.