Author ORCID Identifier

0009-0004-7448-0200

Date of Award

Spring 5-29-2024

Document Type

Thesis (Undergraduate)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Eugene Santos

Second Advisor

Vikrant Vaze

Abstract

The growth of the commercial aviation industry has yielded many interesting problems in the field of Operations Research, many of which are now able to be solved as both technology and mathematical optimization improve. A particularly interesting problem in airport operations re- search is the Aircraft Gate Assignment Problem (AGAP), which seeks to create a feasible match- ing between planes and flights at an airport. This problem is well-suited to modeling with Integer Programming, and has attracted research since the 1970s. Researchers of the AGAP have considered many different objectives, ranging from airline-focused objectives to more passenger-focused objective functions. In this paper, we build on the the work done by scholars of the AGAP, and present a new objective that focuses on reducing possible passenger misconnections, which we argue benefits both parties.

Missed connections cost airlines hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. While some of this is inevitable, there are cases where small adjustments would allow connecting passengers to get to the gate of their flight before the door closes. This paper focuses on those small adjustments that make all the difference. Specifically, we assign flights to gates such that the number of passengers that misconnect is minimized. In effect, this is accomplished by assigning flights with passengers on them with tight connections nearby gates. Special care is given to international flights and the effect of customs clearance and security screening, and our model is applied to a real day’s operation for United Airlines at Dulles International Airport in Virginia. We found that our model has a statistically significant effect on reducing the number of passengers at risk of missing their connecting flights.

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