An Exact Solution Approach for the Airport Stand Allocation Problem

Every day planners and dispatcher in airports deal with different decisions related to the movement of aircraft. These decisions usually involve the use of fixed resources like runways, stands (parking positions), and passenger gates. Due to the increasing flow of passengers, these resources are becoming scarce and some airports have experimented a degradation of the services offered. One clear example is the fact that passengers are more and more being allocated to remote stands where a bus transfer is necessary to get to the terminal. This reality not only affects connection times for passengers, but also increases operation costs and decreases airport revenues, e.g., airlines usually pay lower fees when their flights are allocated at remote stands. In this paper we deal with the stand allocation problem. The interested reader is referred to a complete survey of this problem by Dorndorf (2007). Given a set of aircraft operations and available stands, the task is to find the more profitable assignment of aircraft operations to aircraft stands while respecting operational constraints. Aircraft operations refer to scheduling tasks that need to be physically allocated to a parking position, e.g., arrival, departure, or parking operations. Controllers can also decide to tow an aircraft from one stand to another. These towing operations allow a better utilization of valuable stands (e.g., contact stands); but, on the other hand, an expensive towing tractor movement is required. Additionally, the assignments should satisfy a number of constraints, such as the compatibility between operations and stands and the constraints that prevent adjacency conflicts, e.g., two large aircraft cannot be assigned to adjacent stands at the same time. In this paper, an integer programming formulation is presented. Our research involves the development of several solution methodologies including simple greedy algorithms,