Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
30
20
18
25
16
14
20
12
15
10
8
10
6
4
5
2
0
0
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
0
100
200
300
400
500
Gap [min]
Gap [min]
(a) Model solution
(b) Recorded allocation
Fig. 5.
Gap size distribution
7Con lu on
This paper considers the gate allocation problem and the conflicts which occur
on the taxiways close to the gates. Integration of various airport operations is
gaining increasing importance due to the increasing air trac. Closer integration
of different parts of airports could potentially result in smoother operations,
fuel burn reductions and lower harmful gas emissions. The model of the gate
allocation problem which is presented here moves this integration a step closer
by incorporating some of the taxiway conflicts into the allocation process.
The major gains of the presented model compared to the real solution are an
increase in the robustness of the solutions and a reduction in both the number of
conflicts around the gates and the number of the remote allocations. However,
there are significant differences in the number of tow operations. Having the
towing procedure in the objective instead of explicitly splitting all the long flights
would probably improve the performance of the model in this regard. Changing
the conflict constraint into a soft constraint may be also a good idea, as the
number of remote allocations and the resolved conflicts could then be balanced
by setting appropriate weights in the objective function. The long calculation
times indicate that alternative solution methods should be considered.
Future work will consider potential decompositions of the problem and/or
heuristic approximations to speed up the calculations. Moreover, a deeper anal-
ysis of the conflicts which occur on taxiways, not only close to the gates but also
further away and incorporating this into the allocation process appears to be a
worthwhile area for future work. An analysis of the ground movement with a view
to integration has already been provided by Ravizza et al. [13,14]. Their system
assumes that the gates are already allocated and provides routing information
based upon the assumed gate allocations. Integration of these approaches is an
interesting research area moving forward. Finally, an assessment of the impact
of the parameters and weights used in the model on the obtained results is also
important future work.
