A partial parallel airport gate assignment supported by a knowledge-based system combined with mathematical programming

The gate assignment at an airport is one of the major activities in airport operations. With the increase of passenger traffic volumes and the number of flights, the complexity of this task and the factors to be considered have increased significantly, and an efficient gate utilization has received considerable attention. For overcoming the shortcomings of previous gate assignment approaches, this paper presents a partial parallel gate assignment approach, by which more factors concerning aircraft and gates can be considered at the same time. This paper also presents the method of using a knowledge-based system combined with a mathematical programming method for getting an optimized feasible assignment solution. By this way, it is more easily to get the solution that satisfies both the static and dynamic situations, and thus it may adapt well to meet the needs of actual use to real-time operations. An experimental prototype has been implemented, and a case study is presented at the end of the paper.