Airport gate reassignments considering deterministic and stochastic flight departure/arrival times

It is often the case in actual airport operations that flight departure/arrival information will vary with time. In practice, flight departure/arrival times closer to the time when the airport authority starts to plan the reassignments tend to be more certain; those further away tend to be more stochastic. These two types of flights can be called deterministic flights and stochastic flights, respectively. A deterministic flight has a certain departure/arrival time; while a stochastic flight will have a variety of stochastic departure/arrival times. In this study the aim is to develop a gate reassignment model (GRM) designed to consider both deterministic and stochastic flight departure/arrival times. A 0-1 integer programming technique is applied to formulate the GRM. In practice gate reassignments need to be handled repeatedly, so to make this possible the GRM is applied to a dynamic gate reassignment framework (DGRF). The theoretical effectiveness of the GRM applied to the DGRF is evaluated by the development of a lower bound solution. Numerical tests, related to the operations of an international Taiwan airport, show that the proposed GRM and DGRF perform well.