Airport | EPFL Graph Search

An airport is an aerodrome with extended facilities, mostly for commercial air transport. Airports usually consist of a landing area, which comprises an aerially accessible open space including at least one operationally active surface such as a runway for a plane to take off and to land or a helipad, and often includes adjacent utility buildings such as control towers, hangars and terminals, to maintain and monitor aircraft. Larger airports may have airport aprons, taxiway bridges, air traffic control centres, passenger facilities such as restaurants and lounges, and emergency services. In some countries, the US in particular, airports also typically have one or more fixed-base operators, serving general aviation. Operating airports is extremely complicated, with a complex system of aircraft support services, passenger services, and aircraft control services contained within the operation. Thus airports can be major employers, as well as important hubs for tourism and other k

Un noeud de trafic densifié pour l'EuroAirport Basel Mulhouse Freiburg

Martin Wyss

Today's airports aren't anymore pure interfaces between ground and air. Since several years they are going through an intense development. Their ground and air accessibility attracts real estate development and (re-) links the region it is implemented in. The provoked economical development around the airport has impact on its catchment area and vice versa. The “EuroAirport Basel Mulhouse Freiburg” consists in an important regional airport, connecting its catchment area with Europe and is located at the borders of three countries. The present situation doesn't include any rail connection even though tracks pass by about a kilometer from the terminal. The only access is by road and air traffic. My project aims at an improved accessibility of the EuroAirport - connecting different scales at one place. This new DENSIFIED MODAL INTERCHANGE includes a reorganization of the terminal layout. The old terminal (1970) is demolished and this new void within the existing terminal (20012 - 2005) marks the interconnected modes of transportation and lets the passengers experience their flows. The project adds a high speed train (HST) station and a Ringbahn stop connecting the site to the bigger region and the city of Basel. The train station takes advantage of its location at the crossing of important European HST axes and allows the site to keep the amount of passengers even when its short haul flights will be substituted to HST to free up air space for long haul flights in the coming future.

2011

Multi-Objective Airport Gate Assignment Problem in Planning and Operations

Michel Bierlaire, Prem Kumar

We consider the assignment of gates to arriving and departing flights at a large hub airport. This problem is highly complex even in planning stage when all flight arrivals and departures are assumed to be known precisely in advance. There are various considerations that are involved while assigning gates to incoming and outgoing flights (such a flight pair for the same aircraft is called a turn) at an airport. Different gates have restrictions, such as adjacency, last-in first-out gates and towing requirements, which are known from the structure and layout of the airport. Some of the cost components in the objective function of the basic assignment model include notional penalty for not being able to assign a gate to an aircraft, penalty for the cost of towing an aircraft with a long layover, and penalty for not assigning preferred gates to certain turns. One of the major contributions of this paper is to provide mathematical model for all these complex constraints that are observed at a real airport. Further, we study the problem in both planning and operations modes simultaneously, and such an attempt is, perhaps, unique and unprecedented. For planning mode, we sequentially introduce new additional objectives to our gate assignment problem that have not been studied in the literature so far(i) maximization of passenger connection revenues, (ii) minimization of zone usage costs, and (iii) maximization of gate plan robustnessand include them to the model along with the relevant constraints. For operations mode, the main objectives studied in this paper are recovery of schedule by minimizing schedule variations and maintaining feasibility by minimal retiming in the event of major disruptions. Additionally, the operations mode models must have very, very short run times of the order of a few seconds. These models are then applied to a functional airline at one of its most congested hubs. Implementation is carried out using Optimization Programming Language, and computational results for actual data sets are reported. For the planning mode, analyst perception of weights for the different objectives in the multi-objective model is used wherever actual dollar value of the objective coefficient is not available. The results are also reported for large, reasonable changes in objective function coefficients. For the operations mode, flight delays are simulated, and the performance of the model is studied. The final results indicate that it is possible to apply this model to even large real-life problems instances to optimality within short run times with clever formulation of conventional continuous time assignment model. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Wiley-Blackwell2014

Multi-Objective Airport Gate Assignment Problem

Michel Bierlaire, Prem Kumar

In this paper, we consider the gate assignment for a large airline at its hub airport. It is considered to be a highly complex problem with the possibility of application in both planning as well as operations mode. There are various considerations that are involved while assigning gates to incoming and outgoing turns at an airport. Different gates have restrictions, such as adjacency, LIFO and push time, which is known in advance from the structure of the airport. When optimizing the assignment costs, we consider different and often conflicting objectives such as maximization of gate rest time between two turns, minimization of the cost of towing an aircraft with a long turn and minimization of overall costs that includes penalization for not assigning preferred gates to certain turns. One of the major contributions of this paper is gate assignment in the planning mode to assign airport gates dynamically to scheduled flights based on daily origin and destination passenger flow data ensuring that the number of passenger misconnects at the hub airport is minimized. We formulate these problems as mixed 0-1 integer program with a linear objective function and constraints. Due to the complexity in the problem size and formulation, we have resorted to relaxation for certain instances when a reasonable solution is not obtained within the time limit. In order to compare the performance of standard MIP, a set partitioning formulation is proposed. The advantage of attempting this alternate formulation is the capability to compare the performance of a normal MIP solution with a column generation algorithm. Implementation is done using OPL and computational results for actual data sets are presented.

2011

Multi-Objective Airport Gate Assignment Problem in Planning and Operations

Michel Bierlaire, Prem Kumar

Wiley-Blackwell2014