Flight gate scheduling with respect to a reference schedule

This paper considers the problem of assigning flights to airport gates. We examine the general case in which an aircraft serving a flight may be assigned to different gates for arrival and departure processing and for optional intermediate parking. Restrictions to this assignment include gate closures and shadow restrictions, i.e., the situation where certain gate assignments may cause blocking of neighboring gates. The objectives include maximization of the total assignment preference score, a minimal number of unassigned flights during overload periods, minimization of the number of tows, maximization of a robustness measure as well as a minimal deviation from a given reference schedule. We show that in case of a one period time horizon this objective can easily be integrated into our existing model based on the Clique Partitioning Problem. Furthermore we present a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem for multiple periods.