| Assigning aircrafts to available gates is a key issue in daily airport operation. Air Canada is seeking an alternate plan to replace their current gate assignment schedule. Simple solutions and methods are required for the purpose of comparisons with the current assignment schedule as well as other solutions and methods.; In this thesis, a network-flow based model for assigning flights to gates at airports is presented. The objective is to maximize the total preference of the gate assignment, which includes maximizing the number of gated flights, reducing the towing operations and maximizing the preference value of the gates. Some hard rules are taken into consideration as constraints of this problem. The sample problem comes from the gate scheduling plan for Air Canada at the Halifax International Airport. A lot of preprocessing work is done to solve this problem, including building up the sets, parameters and analysing the data. AMPL and CPLEX MIP solver are applied to solve this problem. The results are analyzed and compared with the original scheduling plan used by Air Canada. It demonstrates that the results obtained from this model improve the total preference of the gate assignment. |
