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 gat e. The total passenger walking distance is based on the passenger tran sfer volume between every pair of aircrafts and the distance between e very pair of gates. Therefore, the problem of assigning gates to arriv ing and departing flights at an airport is a Quadratic Assignment Prob lem (QAP), which is a difficult problem to solve. Recently, integer pr ogramming (IP), simulation, and expert systems have been applied to th e GAP. A new integer programming formulation of the gate assignment pr oblem is presented. An efficient heuristic solution procedure for solv ing the problem is also proposed. The performance of this solution app roach is evaluated in a variety of test problems, and is compared to t he optimal solutions obtained using CPLEX in certain test problems. Th e proposed heuristic solution approach proves to be an efficient metho d for obtaining good solutions for large scale gate assignment problem s in a very reasonable computation time. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd . All rights reserved.