Research On Mixed Set Programming For Gate Assignment In Busy Airports

The lack of gates resource in busy airports has turned out to be a problem with the rapid development of civil aviation industry and the increasing amount of flights in China. The gate assignment problem has become another bottleneck which restricts busy airports’ development after the runway capacity problem. Meanwhile, the possibility that there are conflict risks at the same gate should never be neglected due to the higher delay rate in busy airports.In this paper, a Mixed Set Programming Model for gate assignment in busy airports is established with the goal to achieve a maximum utilization of gates, and corresponding solving rules are also designed. In view of conflict risk between different aircraft in apron of busy airports, this paper builds a computational model of conflict time between adjacent flights in the same stand in order to avoid conflict risk. On this basis, this paper builds a Mixed Set Programming Model based on conflict risk optimization, setting maximum utilization of gates as the prior optimization objective and the minimum conflict time of adjacent flights in a same stand as the second optimization objective. And an efficient solving rule is designed as well. Finally, the paper takes the flights in one day from Beijing Capital International Airport as an example to solve the gate assignment problem. The case analysis shows that gate utilization rate increases 26.51% in the Mixed Set Programming Model allocation result compared to that of manual allocation. While the gate utilization rate increases, the total conflict time between adjacent flights in the same gate is reduced by 1.2 minutes. The results show that Mixed Set Programming Method can be applied in solving the gate assignment problem in actual operation of busy airports, which effectively balances both safety and efficiency in the operation of a busy airport.