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Making [1] project), and this paper considers moving another step forward in
the integration of airport operations.
The presented paper discusses a model for the gate allocation problem taking
into consideration the expected trac around the gates in order to improve the
early stage of gate allocation planning. Gate allocation aims to find appropriate
gates for aircraft at an airport. There are many rules and constraints which
are used to decide the value of an allocation. In contrast to previously published
models, the one presented here contains a new constraint which limits the number
of aircraft which are expected to block each other while manoeuvring at the area
close to the gates. The possible blockages are identified in groups of gates which
are reached using similar routes. Including the expected blockages in the early
stage of planning should result in smoother operation during the day. We believe
this is a good first step in the process of integrating gate allocation with ground
movement, never discussed before. Additionally a novel approach to the towing
procedure is also presented. This is modelled in a flexible way which may be
more practical than some other published models.
Other blockages which occur on taxiways could be modelled similarly and
handled by adding appropriate constraints. This moves the system closer towards
a ground movement system which is planned future work.
The problem description and the background literature are introduced in
Section 2 and Section 3. The model formulation is given in Section 4. Experi-
mental settings and the data used in the experiments are described in Section 5.
Section 6 presents the results, where we discuss how the various model con-
straints influence the final allocation. Finally conclusions and potential future
work are presented in Section 7.
2 Problem Description
There are many operations which need to be synchronized at airports. For exam-
ple, departing aircraft are routed from gates to runways and the routes that they
take and their take off sequence both have to be considered. Similarly arriving
aircraft also need to be sequenced and, once on the ground, they must be routed
from runways to gates. There are usually several taxiways which could be used
to get from one point to another. The chosen taxiway should normally be the
shortest possible route without conflicts. Terminal 1 of Manchester Airport is
shown in Figure 1 as an example. Observe that some gates are placed behind
bottlenecks, for example the gates at
GR
1. Access to those gates is limited and
a poor quality allocation plan can result in severe delays during the day of op-
eration. However, a good plan created in advance which considers the physical
limitations could potentially reduce delays, by limiting the number of aircraft
planned to pass the bottlenecks at the same time.
Examples of physical blockages which can be taken into account in the early
stage of planning are push-back blocking (Figure 2a) and taxi blocking (Fig-
ure 2b). Push-back blocking occurs when a departing aircraft is ready to leave
a gate but cannot due to another aircraft is blocking its push-back trajectory.
