A knowledge-based airport gate assignment system integrated with mathematical programming

Airport gate assignment is the process of selecting and allocating aircraft to gates to create an assignment schedule, and it is one of the major functions of airport operations. With the increase of passenger traffic volumes and the number of flights, the complexity of this task and the factors to be considered have increased significantly, and efficient gate utilization has received considerable attention. This paper proposes a knowledge-based airport gate assignment system integrated with mathematical programming techniques to provide a solution that satisfies both static and dynamic situations within a reasonable computing time. A partial parallel assignment is introduced, which considers a group of aircraft and looks at all the available gates and then does the gate assignments by optimizing a multi-objective function; For the validation of the proposed approach, an example is used as a case study, and a prototype system with various functions has been developed in a microcomputer environment. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.