Reducing airport gate blockage in passenger aviation: Models and analysis

Commercial flights are typically assigned to an arrival gate at their destination station (airport) prior to their departure from their origin station. Although the gate is scheduled to be available when the flight arrives, this is not always the case in practice. Due to variability in departure and flight times, the arriving flight might arrive early, the previous flight departing from the gate might depart late, or both. When a flight arrives at its scheduled gate but has to wait because the preceding aircraft is still occupying that gate, we refer to this as gate blockage. Gate blockage can have many negative impacts, including passenger delays, missed connections, and increased fuel burn. Our research is focused on incorporating the inherent stochasticity of the system into the planning process to reduce the prevalence and impact of gate blockage. Specifically, we formulate an optimization problem to assign flights to gates so as to minimize the expected impact of gate blockage. We use historical data to predict delay distributions and conduct experiments to assess both the computational tractability of our approach and its potential for improvement in solution quality over existing approaches.