Airport gate assignments for airline-specific gates

•We study airport gate assignments for airline-specific gates.•We propose a new objective that results from an airline's perspective.•The objective includes four components regarding airline operations.•We produce better assignments comparing with practical assignments.

The airline-specific gate, which is exclusively used by a specific airline, has been utilized in many airports. Differing from the traditional gate assignment, allocating flights to airline-specific gates is based on the perspective of the airline rather than that of the airport authority. In this study, we propose a new objective that results from an airline's perspective. Numerical tests, based on the operations of a Taiwanese airline, are carried out to assess the performance of the proposed approach.