Robust gate assignment

Robustness is as important as efficiency in air transportation. All components in the air traffic system are connected to form an interactive network. So a disturbance that occurs in one component, e.g., a severe delay at an airport, can impact the entire network. Delays are easily propagated between flights through gates, but the propagation can be reduced if gate assignments are robust against stochastic delays. In this paper, we analyze stochastic delays and suggest an approach to assign gates while making them robust against stochastic delays. We implement the proposed approach and compare it with different approaches that are studied in the literature. Also, we extract a sample flight schedule from the data source and generate 1.5x and 2x schedules based on the sample flight schedule. Simulation results show that our approach improves the robustness of gate assignment. Particularly, the approach reduces the number and level of disturbed assignments by 92.2% and 95.7%, respectively, compared to the original assignment of the sample flight schedule. However, the approach is limited because aircraft and gate compatibility is not considered. © 2011 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.