Robust gate assignment against gate conflicts

Robustness is as important as efficiency in air transportation. All components in the air traffic system are connected to form an interactive network. So, a disturbance that occurs in one component (for example, a severe delay at an airport) can influence the entire network. Delays are easily propagated between flights through gates, but the propagation can be reduced if gate assignments are robust against stochastic delays. In this paper, gate delays are analyzed and an approach is suggested that involves assigning gates while making them robust against stochastic delays. An example flight schedule is extracted from a data source, and schedules are generated with increased traffic to analyze how the compact flight schedules impact the robustness of gate assignment. Simulation results show that this approach improves the robustness of gate assignment. Particularly, the robust gate assignment reduces the average duration of gate conflicts by 96.3% and the number of gate conflicts by 96.7% as compared to the baseline assignment. However, the results are based on the analysis of one day of one airline’s operations, under simplifying assumptions.