Airline Gate Optimization
People who are used to quite a bit of long distance air travels with one or several transits in between, would have at some point in their lifetimes definitely experienced the “moments of anxiety” of missing the connecting flights because of the arrival delays of the flights they are currently travelling – not to forget most of the connecting flights are timed to less than a couple of hours and the worst could be as close as about 45 minutes (source: Frankfurt Airport). This stress especially increases to unbearable levels if the transiting airports happen to be of type as the Frankfurt, Heathrow, Chicago ORD airports etc.
Ever wonder the reasons why? Airports such as the ones described above have multiple terminals and given the distances that passengers need to travel to take the connecting flights in different terminals only increases this stress. To top it all, security measures at the airports have now increased manifold times that sometimes it becomes rather impossible to take the connecting flights should there be even a slightest delay in the arriving flights.
Does that mean we experience instant ‘nirvanic’ feeling should we somehow manage to sneak through all these barriers of distance, security gates etc. and manage to take the connecting flights? The answer would be still a ‘NO’ since then immediately there creeps this thought ‘Oh but what about my baggage?’ This would leave the passenger almost transfixed for the rest of his/her journey wondering the status of the baggage.
So is this all about the passengers alone and do the airlines need bother not this problem at all? Well, not exactly! The airlines in fact take the maximum hit out of this sub or poorly optimized gate allocations. The costs involved in providing a passenger who missed a connecting flight with an alternate airline connection, providing accommodations in cases where alternate connections are not possible at that time, cost due to lost/misplaced baggage etc. increase exponentially with the number of passengers with missed connecting flights.
And, finally is there a way where this problem impacting both the passenger and the airlines company be addressed at one go? Yes, this is where Operations Research Optimizations or OR as it is widely known comes handy. The OR takes into consideration all the input variables that impact the outcome – in this case to minimize the distance travelled by passengers bound for connecting flights (and thereby ensure the number of passengers failing to catch a connecting flight is minimized – impacting the airline operation costs)
Linear/Non linear Optimization techniques can be used to compute the best possible gates that can be assigned to an incoming flight such that the total number of people who fail to catch connecting flights is kept to a minimum. Number of passengers bound for connecting flights, time and distance required for the baggage to be moved from the incoming flight to the connecting flight, number of personnel required, costs of providing a passenger with accommodation, costs of providing a passenger with alternate connection etc. will then on become the constraints to solving this gate assignment problem.
The gate optimization problem requires to take into consideration that the operations performed would be dynamic as the time delay of arriving flights delays are not known before hand(at least in most cases) .