Robust airport gate assignment

In this paper, we propose a new strategy for the robust constraint resource assignment problem and apply it to solve the robust airport gate assignment (RAGA). RAGA attempts to accurately build an evaluation criteria for the ability of an aircraft-to-gate assignment to handle uncertainty on aircraft schedule; and to accurately and effectively search the most robust airport gate assignment. We model the RAGA by a stochastic programming model and transform it into a binary programming model by introducing the unsupervised estimation functions without knowing any information on the real-time arrival and departure time of aircrafts in advance. Moreover, a partition-based search space encoding, two neighborhood operators for single or multiple aircrafts reassignment, and a hybrid meta-heuristic combining a tabu search and a local search are proposed to solve RAGA efficiently. Experimental results on the real-life test data from Hong Kong International Airport demonstrate that the proposed RAGA model provides a valuable tool for the airport to improve its robustness in uncertain operations