Procedures for aircraft-gate assignment

Abstract

The task of assigning arriving flights to the available gates at an airport can have a major impact on the efficiency with which the flight schedules are maintained and on the level of passenger satisfaction. In this paper, optimum and heuristic procedures are developed to assign flights in such a way that the idle periods, during which gates are not utilized, are distributed as uniformly as possible. Emprical study indicates that up to 60% improvements can be achieved over the current practice.