Numerical Analysis of Gate Conflict Duration and Passenger Transit Time in Airport

Abstract: Robustness is as important as efficiency in air transportation. All components in the air traffic system are connected to form an interactive network. So, a disturbance that occurs in one component, for example, a severe delay at an airport, can influence the entire network. Delays are easily propagated between flights through gates, but the propagation can be reduced if gate assignments are robust against stochastic delays. In this paper, we analyze gate delays and suggest an approach that involves assigning gates while making them robust against stochastic delays. We extract an example flight schedule from data source and generate schedules with increased traffic to analyze how the compact flight schedules impact the robustness of gate assignment. Simulation results show that our approach improves the robustness of gate assignment. Particularly, the robust gate assignment reduces average duration of gate conflicts by 96.3% and the number of gate conflicts by 96.7% compared to the baseline assignment. However, the robust gate assignment results in longer transit time for passengers, and a trade-off between the robustness of gate assignment and passenger transit time is presented.