An Airline Scheduling Model and Solution Algorithms

Abstract

The rapid development of airlines, has made airports busier and more complicated. The assignment of scheduled to available gates is a major issue for daily airline operations. We consider the over-constrained airport gate assignment problem(AGAP) where the number of flights exceeds the number of available gates, and where the objectives are to minimize the number of ungated flights and the total walking distance or connection times. The procedures used in this project are to create a mathematical model formulation to identify decision variables to identify, constraints and objective functions. In addition, we will consider in the AGAP the size of each gate in the terminal and also the towing process for the aircraft. We will use a greedy algorithm to solve the problem. The greedy algorithm minimizes ungated flights while providing initial feasible solutions that allow flexibility in seeking good solutions, especially in case when flight schedules are dense in time. Experiments conducts give good results.