An aircraft-to-gate reassignment framework for dealing with schedule disruptions

This paper proposes an integrated framework for reassigning flights to airport gates in case of schedule disruptions. The framework relies on a Binary Integer model which is the first multidimensional assignment model that uses gate location and the resulting required connection time to assess the success of passenger transfers. The model can be optimized for various objective functions and can also be extended to consider apron capacity and flight cancellations. In this study, we first review the measures of effectiveness used in current gate reassignment approaches. Afterwards, we perform a set of preliminary experiments to demonstrate the main features of the model and verify its sensitivity to input changes. Then, we apply it in a real case study, where we examine the interaction of measures of effectiveness and investigate the impact of our proposed way of modeling missed connections on the optimal solution. Our results demonstrate the necessity of considering passenger connections in the optimization procedure since they contribute significantly to the total solution cost. We also show that, except for extreme cases (negligible disruptions or high delays within the airport), considering gate location yields different results than simply assuming that a fixed time threshold is sufficient for all connections.