Integrated Gate and Bus Assignment at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol

At an airport a series of assignment problems need to be solved before aircraft can arrive and depart and passengers can embark and disembark. A lot of different parties are involved with this, each of which having to plan their own schedule. Two of the assignment problems that the ’Regie’ at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (AAS) is responsible for, are the gate assignment problem (i.e. where to place which aircraft) and the bus assignment problem (i.e. which bus will transport which passengers to or from the aircraft). Currently these two problems are solved in a sequential fashion, the output of the gate assignment problem is used as input for the bus assignment problem. We look at integrating these two sequential problems into one larger problem that considers both problems at the same time. This creates the possibility of using information regarding the bus assignment problem while solving the gate assignment problem. We developed a column generation algorithm for this problem and have implemented a prototype. To make the algorithm efficient we used a special technique called stabilized column generation and also column deletion. Computational experiments with real-life data from AAS indicate that our algorithm is able to compute a planning for one day at Schiphol in a reasonable time.