Optimizing airport gate scheduling with controllable processing times using NSGA-II algorithm

Gate schedulin is a key activity at airports that is proposed as an optimization problem. The main purpose of this problem is to find an assignment for the flights arriving and departing while satisfying a set of constraints. In all studies, airport gate processing time was considered fixed. In this research, however, we investigate the more realistic situation that airport gate processing time is controllable; it leads to increase the total performance of gate scheduling. It is assumed that the possible compression/expansion processing time of a flight can be continuously controlled, i.e. it can be any number in a given interval. Depending on the situation, different objectives become important. The aim of this study is to simultaneously (1) minimize total cost of tardiness, earliness, delay as well as compression and expansion costs of job processing time and (2) minimize the passengers overcrowding on gate problem with considering some practical constrainst. In this study, we first propose a mixed-integer programming model for the considered. Due to complexity of problem, a multi-objective meta-heuristic algorithms, i.e. non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) is applied. For calibrating the parameter of the algorithms Taguchi method is used and the optimal levels of the algorithm’s performance is selected. The algorithm is tested with real life data from Mehrabad International Airport for medium size problems.

Keywords:

Gate scheduling problem , Multi-objective decision making , NSGA-II , Controllable processing times