Fuzzy model and optimization for airport gate assignment problem

Gate assignment is an important decision making problem which involves multiple and conflict objectives in airport. In this paper, fuzzy model is proposed to handle two main objectives, minimizing the total walking distance for passengers and maximizing the robustness of assignment. The idle times of flight-to-gate are regarded as fuzzy variables, and whose membership degrees are used to express influence on robustness of assignment. Adjustment function on membership degree is introduced to transfer two objectives into one. Modified genetic algorithm is adopted to optimize the NP-hard problem. Finally, illustrative example is given to evaluate the performance of fuzzy model. Three distribution functions are tested, and comparison with the method of fixed buffer time is given. Simulation results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of proposed fuzzy method.