Development of Mathematical Model in Designing a DSS for Optimizing Gate Allocation at Airport (Case study: Mehrabad)

Airports as important air transportation infrastructures prepare passenger and cargo flow connection between air and other transport modes. Reasonably, airport is the place to relevance three main components of air transportation, airport, airline and passenger (or any other user). Effective and adequate utilization of the airside areas is the first principle objective for airport management all over the world. One of the most important parts of airside area, which has vital need for scheduling aircraft’s suspension, is gates (the aircraft’s suspension place). In this research we present and develop a mixed-integer programming model for allocating flights to gates, and use it as the gate allocation engine for designing a Decision Support System. By the comparison between the model and manual allocation result, we will examine the model’s reliability and by making changes in the model’s objective function’s scale, we evaluate the model’s sensitivity on these objectives. Main purpose of research has direct focus on cost, and as an example (case study), we describe the application of this process at Tehran Mehrabad International Airport to develop a DSS for making gate allocation decisions for their passenger flights. The results don’t show any salient difference in the model’s sensation on the two objective functions.