Aircraft Gate Assignment using Lagrangian Relaxation Method

In this paper, we propose a mathematical model of the aircraft gate assingment problems to relax passengers inconveniences of getting on and off an aircraft. The model is in the form of a 0-1 integer mathematical programming, with which we can express an overflow of aircrafts from terminal gates to remote parking area. An alogrithm based on the Lagrangian relaxation method accompanied by a non-trivial construction of the relaxation problem and a Lagrangian heuristic of getting feasible solutions is also proposed to solve the proglem. The proposed method is evaluated in a variety of test problems, compared to other ones. The results show that the proposed model and algorithm have an significant effect on relaxing passengers inconveniences by simultaneously minimizing both the overflow of aircrafts and the passengers walking distance in the terminal.