Airport gate assignment problem with harbor constraints based on Branch-and-Price algorithm

The airport gate assignment problem is the main problem in airport operation management. Most existing studies on the airport gate assignment problem focus more on the improvement of gate utilization efficiency and ignore apron operation safety. Aiming at addressing this problem, an airport gate assignment problem with harbor safety constraints is proposed in this paper. A two-phase mathematical optimization model is constructed to optimize the efficiency of gate utilization considering the safety constraints in harbors. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explicitly focus on harbor apron security in the gate assignment problem. Then, the exact branch-and-price method is improved by incorporating a label-based pricing algorithm and two acceleration strategies. These strategies include an upper bound prediction strategy for handling the large number of subproblems and a lower parameter symmetry elimination strategy to overcome column generation degradation. The results show that the proposed gate assignment model and improved branch-and-price method optimize the efficiency of gate utilization under the condition of avoiding security conflicts in harbor aprons. The improved branch-and-price method has advantages in terms of both accuracy and efficiency compared with those of other solvers.