Airport Gate Scheduling for Passengers, Aircraft, and Operation

Passengers’ experience is becoming a key metric to evaluate the air transportation system’s performance. Efficient and robust tools to handle airport operations are needed along with a better understanding of passengers’ interests and concerns. Among various airport operations, this paper studies airport gate scheduling for improved passengers’ experience. Three objectives accounting for passengers, aircraft, and operation are presented. Trade-offs between these objectives are analyzed, and a balancing objective function is proposed. The results show that the balanced objective can improve the efficiency of traffic flow in passenger terminals and on ramps, as well as the robustness of gate operations. Keywords-airport gate assignment; ramp operation; passengers’ experience; optimization