Research On Optimization Techniques Of Airport Gate Assignment

Gate is one of the key resources of airport operation management. Whether the gate assignment is reasonable or not directly affects the efficiency of the whole airport. So research on optimization techniques of airport gate assignment has the extremely important practical application value. Currently, the airports are lack of gate resources, and the time intervals between flights are short. When flights in and out the gate delay at random, other flights in the airport will be influenced, and reassigning the flights is time-consuming. Therefore, by researching on optimization techniques of airport gate assignment, a robust assignment mathematical model of airport gate is set up, and an efficient algorithm is used to quickly generate the scheme, which have a very important significance to enhance the ability to resist disturbance of gate assignment scheme, ensure flight schedules are enforced, improve passenger service quality, make full use of existing security facilities, and delay or reduce the airport construction investment.On the basis of previous study, this paper made a deep research on the robust assignment of airport gate. First, the previous robust assignment models of airport gate were summarized. Second, considering different flight type corresponding to different delay costs of per unit time, on the basis of the robust assignment models which set the balance of buffer time as the objective function in the past, the concept of buffer time weight under the influence of different flight type was introduced, a new evaluation function which reflects the robust assignment of airport gate was designed, and the concept of gate plan was introduced, then a new robust assignment mathematical model of airport gate was set up. Third, column generation method was adopted to solve this model, and the branch and bound algorithm was used to handle the non-integer solutions. Finally, the example of a domestic airport was analyzed, and results showed that compared with the existed robust assignment model of airport gate, the results from the robust assignment model of airport gate in this paper are more reasonable. What’s more, column generation methods in this paper have certain advantages in solution quality than tabu search algorithm and genetic algorithm, and computation time is also acceptable.