Real-Time Gate Reassignment Based on Flight Delay Feature in Hub Airport

Appropriate gate reassignment is crucially important in efficiency improvement on airport sources and service quality of travelers. The paper divides delay flight into certain delay time flight and uncertain delay time flight based on flight delay feature. The main objective functions of model are to minimize the disturbance led by gate reassignment in the case of certain delay time flight and uncertain delay time flight, respectively. Another objective function of model is to build penalty function when the gate reassignment of certain delay time flight influences uncertain delay time flight. Ant colony algorithm (ACO) is presented to simulate and verify the effectiveness of the model. The comparison between simulation result and artificial assignment shows that the result coming from ACO is obvious prior to the result coming from artificial assignment. The maximum disturbance of gate assignment is decreased by 13.64%, and the operation time of ACO is 118 s. The results show that the strategy of gate reassignment is feasible and effective.