An Integrative Approach with Sequential Game to Real-Time Gate Assignment under CDM Mechanism

This paper focuses on real-time airport gate assignment problem when small-scale or medium- to large-scale flight delays occur. Taking into account the collaborative decision making (CDM) of the airlines and the airport, as well as the interests of multiagent (airlines, airports, and passengers), especially those influenced by flight banks, slot assignment and gate assignment are integrated into mixed set programming (MSP), and a real-time gate assignment model is built and solved through MSP coupled with sequential game. By this approach, the delay costs of multiagent can be minimized simultaneously; the fuel consumption of each airline can be basically equalized; the computation time can be significantly saved by sequential game; most importantly, the collaboration of the airlines and the airport is achieved so that the transferring cost caused by the delay of flight banks can be decreased as much as possible. A case study on small-scale flight delays verifies that the proposed approach is economical, robust, timesaving, and collaborative. A comparison of the traditional staged method and the proposed approach under medium- to large-scale flight delays proves that the integrative method is much more economical and timesaving than the traditional staged method.