Solving the flight gate assignment problem using dynamic programming

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of assigning flights to airport gates—a problem which is NP-hard in general. We focus on a special case in which the maximization of flight/gate preference scores is the only objective. We show that for a variable number of flights and gates, this problem is still NP-hard. For a fixed number of gates, we present a dynamic programming approach that solves the flight assignment problem in linear time with respect to the number of flights. Computational results using real life data from a major European airport prove the practical relevance of this approach.