Stochastic optimization models for the airport gate assignment problem

Uncertainties inherent in the airport traffic may lead to the unavailability of gates for accommodating scheduled flights. Incorporating random disruptions is crucial in constructing effective flight-gate assignments. We consider the gate assignment problem under uncertainty in flight arrival and departure times and develop stochastic programming models incorporating robustness measures based on the number of conflicting flights, idle and buffer times. The proposed models are formulated as large-scale mixed-integer programming problems and tabu search algorithms are implemented to obtain assignments of reasonable quality. We conduct a computational study to analyze the proposed alternate models and show the effectiveness of the solution methods.