Flight Gate Allocation: Modells, Methods and Robust Solutions

We consider the problem of assigning flights to airport gates. We examine the general case in which an aircraft serving a flight may be assigned to different gates for arrival and departure processing and for optional intermediate parking. Restrictions to this assignment include gate closures and shadow restrictions, i. e. the situation where certain gate assignments may cause blocking of neighboring gates. The objectives include maximization of the total assignment preference score, a minimal number of unassigned flights during overload periods, minimization of the number of tows, maximization of a robustness measure as well as a minimal deviation from a given reference schedule. We discuss exact as well as ejection chain based solution procedures which are based on modelling as resource constrained project scheduling problem or as a clique partitioning problem.