Procedures for providing robust gate assignments for arriving aircrafts

Assigning commercial service aircrafts to the available gates at an airport depends on flights scheduled, their actual behavior relative to those schedules, aircraft servicing requirements and capacities of ramp facilities. Flight delays, severe weather, or equipment failures can disrupt the planned schedules, and compound the difficulty of maintaining smooth station operations. A mixed-binary mathematical model with a quadratic function for minimizing the variance of idle times at the gates is proposed to make the initial assignments insensitive to variations in flight schedules. Experimental results with a branch and bound algorithm indicate that more computational effort is required to assign flights optimally over low utilized gates. Furthermore, a heuristic employing the priority function which considers additionally the possible idle times from the future assignments outperforms the others, significantly. Over the real data obtained from the Saudi Arabian Airlines, average 87.4% and 76.2% of improvements can be obtained on the number of aircrafts assigned initially to remote area and that towed from their assigned gates during the real-time implementation, respectively. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.