Airport gate scheduling for passengers, aircraft, and operations

A passenger’s experience is becoming a key metric to evaluate the air transportation system’s performance. Efficient and robust tools to handle airport operations are needed along with a better understanding of passengers’ interests and concerns. This paper is concerned with airport gate scheduling for improved passenger experience while ensuring robust airside operations. Three metrics accounting for passengers, aircraft, and operations are presented. Tradeoffs between these metrics are analyzed, and a balancing objective function is proposed. Numerical simulations show that the balanced objective can improve the efficiency of passenger movement within the landside terminals and aircraft traffic flows on ramps, as well as the robustness of gate operations.