Robustness Algorithms for the Airport Gate Assignment Problem

Assigning commercial flights to available airport gates can have a major impact on the efficiency of flight schedules as well as on the level of passenger satisfaction with the service. These assignments also depend on the service requirements of flights and the capacity of stand facilities. Unexpected changes also called perturbations, like those due to air traffic delays, severe weather conditions, or equipment failures, may disrupt the initial assignments and increase the difficulty of maintaining smooth operations, which will detrimentally affect costumer satisfaction. The provision of solutions which reduce the potential detrimental effect of perturbations in the stands already assigned on the day of operation is desirable and some approaches are presented here, and compare between them to help identify their performance and trends

Robustness Algorithms for the Airport Gate Assignment Problem

Assigning commercial flights to available airport gates can have a major impact on the efficiency of flight schedules as well as on the level of passenger satisfaction with the service. These assignments also depend on the service requirements of flights and the capacity of stand facilities. Unexpected changes also called perturbations, like those due to air traffic delays, severe weather conditions, or equipment failures, may disrupt the initial assignments and increase the difficulty of maintaining smooth operations, which will detrimentally affect costumer satisfaction. The provision of solutions which reduce the potential detrimental effect of perturbations in the stands already assigned on the day of operation is desirable and some approaches are presented here, and compare between them to help identify their performance and trends

Constructive and evolutionary algorithms for airport baggage sorting station and gate assignment problems

Correct assignment of airport resources can greatly affect the quality of service which airlines and airports provide to their customers. Good assignments can help airlines and airports to keep to published schedules, by minimising changes in these schedules and reducing delays. Given the expected increases in civil air traffic, the complexities of resource scheduling and assignment continue to increase. For this reason, as well as the dynamic nature of the problems, scheduling and assignment are becoming increasingly more difficult. The assignment of baggage sorting stations to flights is one of the resource assignment problems at an airport, and like many other real world optimisation problems, it naturally has several objectives, which conflict with each other. A model of the problem is presented, different approaches to obtaining good solutions are looked at and studied to gain an insight into their qualities. Furthermore, algorithms are studied to improve the already good solutions obtained by the approaches considered and their performance is studied where some characteristics of the problem change, such as the number of baggage sorting stations or the topology of the airport. Changes to the flight schedule on the day of operation may invalidate previous assignments of flights to resources. These perturbations may not only affect the disrupted flights but also other flights already assigned. Some existing approaches are looked at, and others are suggested to take account of these potential perturbations at the time the assignments are generated with the aim of mitigating their detrimental effect on the day of operation. The constructive search algorithms and robustness methods are potentially important in a wider variety of problems other than the Airport Baggage Sorting Station Assignment Problem (ABSSAP). By way of illustration, the same techniques are applied to the widely studied Airport Gate Assignment Problem (AGAP)

Constructive and evolutionary algorithms for airport baggage sorting station and gate assignment problems

Correct assignment of airport resources can greatly affect the quality of service which airlines and airports provide to their customers. Good assignments can help airlines and airports to keep to published schedules, by minimising changes in these schedules and reducing delays. Given the expected increases in civil air traffic, the complexities of resource scheduling and assignment continue to increase. For this reason, as well as the dynamic nature of the problems, scheduling and assignment are becoming increasingly more difficult. The assignment of baggage sorting stations to flights is one of the resource assignment problems at an airport, and like many other real world optimisation problems, it naturally has several objectives, which conflict with each other. A model of the problem is presented, different approaches to obtaining good solutions are looked at and studied to gain an insight into their qualities. Furthermore, algorithms are studied to improve the already good solutions obtained by the approaches considered and their performance is studied where some characteristics of the problem change, such as the number of baggage sorting stations or the topology of the airport. Changes to the flight schedule on the day of operation may invalidate previous assignments of flights to resources. These perturbations may not only affect the disrupted flights but also other flights already assigned. Some existing approaches are looked at, and others are suggested to take account of these potential perturbations at the time the assignments are generated with the aim of mitigating their detrimental effect on the day of operation. The constructive search algorithms and robustness methods are potentially important in a wider variety of problems other than the Airport Baggage Sorting Station Assignment Problem (ABSSAP). By way of illustration, the same techniques are applied to the widely studied Airport Gate Assignment Problem (AGAP)

An evolutionary algorithm for the over-constrained airport baggage sorting station assignment problem

Airport baggage sorting stations are the places at which the baggage for each flight accumulates for loading into containers or directly onto the aircraft. In this paper the multi-objective and multi-constraint problem of assigning Baggage Sorting Stations in an Airport is defined and an Evolutionary Algorithm is presented, which uses a number of different operators to find good solutions to the problem. The contributions of these different operators are studied, giving insights into how the appropriate choice may depend upon the specifics of the problem at the time