Multi-Objective Gate Assignment Problem for an Airport

Airport Gate Assignment (AGA) for arriving aircraft is an important aspect of airport operations that has profound impact on the other downstream processes in the airport. Aircraft is often assigned a gate based on their scheduled arrival time which ensures smooth ground operations if everything runs according to plan. Unfortunately, last minute re-assignments happen very frequently to account for real-time developments on the ground. In this paper, a multi-objective gate assignment model has been developed using heuristic method. The model aims to reduce passengers walking distance, balance the human traffic across the two piers, even out the utilisation rates of the gates and maintain an empty gate or space between occupied gates. The gate assigned by the developed model, makes the terminal's down-stream operations more susceptible to uncertainty and disruptive changes. The model developed is also flexible to allow users to set the priorities of the weight, promoting it as a human-centric decision making system and making it suitable for daily operation.