A Robust Approach for the Airport Gate Assignment

Airport gate assignment is a critical issue for the operation management of an airport. Airport gate assignment is to assign flights to gates according to their real-time arrival time and departure time, such that each flight is assigned to exactly one gate, and there is no conflict between two consecutive flights assigned to the same gate. We formulate the airport gate assignment as a stochastic binary integer programming, in which the realtime arrival and departure time are stochastic parameters. Concerning the real-time flight disturbance, a robust approach is introduced to protect the airport gate assignment from flight disturbance such as flight delay or early arrival. Instead of making strong assumption on the distribution of the real-time arrival and departure time of a flight, we assume that they belong to pre-specified uncertainty sets. The robust approach is to make sure that the airport gate assignment is feasible for all possible value for the real-time arrival and departure time within their uncertainty sets. Under these uncertainty sets, we can transform the stochastic binary integer programming to a mix integer programming. The computational results on the real-life test data from Hong Kong International Airport demonstrate that our robust approach can avoid realtime gate conflict efficiently.