An Improved PSO Approach to Solve the Flight Gate Assignment Problem

This paper studied a flight gate assignment problem where both the passenger service quality and the flight taxiing distance are considered in the objective function. A more efficient flight gate assignment model is built. Based on this model, we further propose an improved particle swami optimization algorithm to solve it. A novel "flight-to-gate" coding scheme is designed to convert a particle position vector into the priority sequence of gates for each flight. Some tournament selection comparison rules arc employed to update the position vectors of particles where a small part of infeasible individuals are kept in the iterative process of PSO. In order to improve the performance of PSO algorithm, a local search strategy based on swap operation is introduced to exploit more latitude of search space to anchor the global optimum. The algorithm is tested based on the simulated operational data from the actual airport. Experimental results reveal that our algorithm can achieve a good performance.