Passengers' 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. Among various airport operations, this paper studies airport gate scheduling for improved passengers' experience. Three objectives accounting for passengers, aircraft, and operation are presented. Trade-offs between these objectives are analyzed, and a balancing objective function is proposed. The results show that the balanced objective can improve the efficiency of traffic flow in passenger terminals and on ramps, as well as the robustness of gate operations.

With the rapid development of airlines, airports today become much busier and more complicated than previous days. During airlines daily operations, assigning the available gates to the arriving aircrafts based on the fixed schedule is a very important issue, which motivates researchers to study and solve Airport Gate Assignment Problems (AGAP) with all kinds of state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization techniques. In this paper, we study the AGAP and propose a novel hybrid mathematical model based on the method of constraint programming and 0 - 1 mixed-integer programming. With the objective to minimize the number of gate conflicts of any two adjacent aircrafts assigned to the same gate, we build a mathematical model with logical constraints and the binary constraints. For practical considerations, the potential objective of the model is also to minimize the number of gates that airlines must lease or purchase in order to run their business smoothly. We implement the model in the Optimization Programming Language (OPL) and carry out empirical studies with the data obtained from online timetable of Continental Airlines, Houston Gorge Bush Intercontinental Airport IAH, which demonstrate that our model can provide an efficient evaluation criteria for the airline companies to estimate the efficiency of their current gate assignments.

Airport gate assignment is of great importance in airport operations. In this paper, we study the Airport Gate Assignment Problem (AGAP), propose a new model and implement the model with Optimization Programming language (OPL). With the objective to minimize the number of conflicts of any two adjacent aircrafts assigned to the same gate, we build a mathematical model with logical constraints and the binary constraints, which can provide an efficient evaluation criterion for the Airlines to estimate the current gate assignment. To illustrate the feasibility of the model we construct experiments with the data obtained from Continental Airlines, Houston Gorge Bush Intercontinental Airport IAH, which indicate that our model is both energetic and effective. Moreover, we interpret experimental results, which further demonstrate that our proposed model can provide a powerful tool for airline companies to estimate the efficiency of their current work of gate assignment.