Membership‐based aircraft parking stand allocation system with time window constraints: An event‐based time–space separated algorithm

Abstract

Outsourcing maintenance service providers are vital to guarantee safe operation in airline industry. To reduce the workload and avoid incompatible arrangement schemes in traditional manual arrangement, this article constructs an intelligent system with a novelly designed model and algorithm for membership‐based aircraft parking stand allocation problem. This problem arises from outsourcing maintenance service providers. They need to first serve membership orders, while guaranteeing punctual delivery of other orders. In particular, mutual collision should be strictly avoided between aircrafts. To solve this problem, first, a mathematical model is constructed to optimize timetable and aircraft parking stand allocation scheme. Second, to quickly obtain feasible scheduling scheme, three kinds of mechanisms, including information guidance mechanism, boundary arrangement mechanisms and local optimal adjustment mechanism, are novelly proposed. Moreover, event‐based time–space separated heuristic algorithm is subtly designed based on time–space separation characteristics. In addition, coding schemes are proposed through problem analysis. Finally, three cases with different scales are utilized and six comparison algorithms are selected to illustrate the superiority of our proposed algorithm.