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Airport Gate Assignment Considering
Ground Movement
Urszula M. Neuman and Jason A.D. Atkin
University of Nottingham, School of Computer Science
Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road, Nottingham NG8 1BB, United Kingdom
{
psxun,jason.atkin
}
@nottingham.ac.uk
Abstract.
Airports all over the world are becoming busier and many of
them are facing capacity problems. The actual airport capacity strongly
depends on the eciency of the resource utilisation. Although simultane-
ously handling all of the problems may result in more effective resource
utilisation, historically different types of airport resources have been han-
dled independently. Despite introducing new support systems the histor-
ical separation has often remained. This may increase congestion, which
has a negative impact on both the passengers' comfort and the envi-
ronment. This paper focuses on modelling the gate allocation problem
taking into consideration possible conflicts at taxiways around gates. In-
troducing the taxiway information in the early stage of the allocation
planning is a step forward in integration of the two airport operations.
Various configurations of the model have been tested using a real data
set to evaluate how the new anti-conflict and novel towing constraints
influence the final allocation.
Keywords:
Airport Gate Assignment, Mathematical Modelling, Mixed
Integer Programming.
1 Introduction
Air trac is increasing all over the world. Airports are becoming busier and many
of them are facing capacity problems. Effective resource management, therefore,
has a key importance for airports.
Airport resources can be divided into an air-side part, which consists of run-
ways, taxiways and gate areas, and a land-side part which includes terminal
buildings. In practice different parts of the airport are often managed and main-
tained in isolation from each other, often due to the fact that they had to be
solved manually in the past, and by different organisations. So, conflicting ob-
jectives are common. An airport may, for example, prefer to allocate a flight to
a particular gate because of a lower trac in its neighbourhood while an airline
prefers to use a different gate which is closer to the runways. If the whole airport
was managed as one inseparable operation, its operations would be smoother,
but this may require major changes in the airport management structure. This
is starting to happen (especially as a part of the Airport Collaborative Decision