Impact of gate assignment on gate-holding departure control strategies

Analyze the impact of gate assignment on gate-holding departure control. In order to simulate the airport departure process, a queuing model is proposed, consisting of a push-back queue, a taxi-out time estimator, and a runway queue. The model is validated and reproduces airport departure throughput close to the data. Because the performance of gate holding relies on gate separations, a robust gate assignment is introduced. The results show that gate holding shifts some taxi-out times to gate delays, and it causes gate conicts between the gate-held departures and arrivals. The robust gate assignment reduces the occurrence of gate conicts under gate-holding departure control strategies and helps the control strategies to utilize gate-holding times to an extent by maximizing gate separations.