Optimizing airport gate assignment with operational safety constraints

This paper makes a comprehensive review of existing approaches and presents an optimization model for the airport gate assignment problem (AGAP) considering operational safety constraints. The main objective is to minimize the dispersion of gate idle time periods (robust assignment) while dealing with the problem of aircraft size mismatching with its gate type and avoiding the potential hazard caused by gate apron operational conflict. Genetic algorithm is adopted to solve the problem. An illustrative example is given to show the validity of the model and algorithm.