Development of an intelligent airport operations scheduling system

In this study, the focus was placed on the gate assignment problem at an airport, as it is a major activity that impacts the other aspects of airport operations. Aircraft-Gate Assignment Problem (AGAP) is a well-known NP-hard problem for optimization. The assignment itself requires considerations of a number of factors with some of which not easily represented in mathematical formulae and the solution may not necessarily be guaranteed. During daily airport operations the arrival and departure times of flights may vary compared to their original schedules. This may require reassignment of gates to capture the dynamics of flights and gate status to enhance the level of services provided to passengers. For busy airports with high number of arrivals/departures, the assignment decisions must be made within a short time to capture all the changes