Airport gate reassignment with transfer connections

Due to the rapid growth in air traffic demand and lags in infrastructure expansion, most of the hub airports are running close to capacity. As one of the most important and highly utilized infrastructures in airports, gate resources are generally insufficient. Restricted by this resource limitation, flight gate schedules are generally tight with little buffer time. A major consequence of tight flight schedules is that gate conflicts between arrivals and departures may frequently occur when faced with flight schedule disturbances during daily airport operations. When disruptions are encountered, flights generally need to be re-scheduled and, therefore, have to be reassigned to other available gates. The traditional gate reassignment process generally neglects the connection feasibility of passengers and crews. As a result, the transfer connections of both passengers and crews are very likely to be disrupted if such a reassignment plan is carried out. This disruption will result in serious inconvenience as well as huge costs to the airport, and therefore is of importance during the gate reassignment planning. In this paper, we first develop a gate reassignment model that explicitly considers transfer connection feasibility for both passengers and crews. Then, an iterative heuristic method is proposed to solve this model efficiently in order to meet real-time application requirements. This method was tested on realistic data from an international hub airport, and the computational results show that the proposed method yields a significant improvement (75.1% on average) over the benchmark approaches.