Gate Assignment to Minimize Passenger Transit Time and Aircraft Taxi Time

This research focuses on airport gates, which are limited resources in the air transportation system. In spite of its importance, ramp congestion has not been considered in traditional research on gate assignment. This research, therefore, proposes a new perspective on the gate assignment problem that accounts for ramp congestion, as well as passenger flow. The proposed gate assignment problem minimizes weighted nominal taxi time and weighted taxi delay, as well as passenger transit time in the terminal. Nominal taxi time and taxi delay are weighted by the number of passengers on board. As a result, the flow in the passenger terminal and on ramps becomes efficient. To get near-optimal solutions within a reasonable amount of time, two metaheuristic algorithms, tabu search and genetic algorithm, are implemented for two ramp configurations. Also, the tradeoff between passenger flow and ramp congestion is analyzed.