Improving Resilience in the Stand Allocation Problem
Name
Zimmer-BowserJr-SM-AeroAstro-2026-Thesis.pdf
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1.52 MB
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Adobe PDF
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9c7875aa016faf94e313297f1c3c1010
Author(s)
Zimmer, Kevin
Advisor(s)
Balakrishnan, Hamsa
Odoni, Amedeo
Date Issued
February 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Every day, airports face the task of assigning a stand (i.e., an aircraft parking position) to each of the day’s scheduled flights. The process of finding a feasible allocation of stands to flights is known as the Stand Allocation Problem (SAP), and it is a central component of airport operations. While there may be many feasible solutions to the SAP, some may be preferable to others, and there are various metrics by which stand allocations are assessed. As flights can be delayed (or arrive early) for a myriad of reasons, the SAP necessarily contains uncertainty, and deviations from scheduled flight times can lead to conflicts where two aircraft assigned to the same stand need it at the same time. Adjustments to the stand allocations need to be made to resolve such conflicts, which can be costly as passengers may need to move to a new gate, checked bags and other equipment may need to be moved to the new stand, and airline personnel will have to relocate. As such, an important objective in the SAP is to create an allocation which is resilient to disturbances in the schedule such as flight delays. In this thesis, we empirically demonstrate that by adding a buffer time between consecutive flights at the same stand, an airport may be able to achieve a significant reduction in stand changes at relatively minor cost to other optimality metrics. Using actual flight data, we prepare a stand allocation plan for various buffer times using the scheduled arrival and departure times of the flights (and with the objective of minimizing passenger walking time to the gate), and then check how many changes need to be made when we account for the delays (or early arrivals) that took place. Doing so, we find that by adding a buffer, we can achieve a significant reduction in the number of passengers subjected to a gate change at relatively little increase in passenger walking time. Furthermore, we quantify the tradeoff between buffer time and utilization, and explore trends in stand utilization data and how this can inform an airport’s long-term planning.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
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