A multicriteria approach for the construction of a ‘costs matrix’ of an assignment model for stand aircraft management

One of the daily operational tasks, in any airport, is the assignment of a stand to each aircraft that lands on it. An assignment model, and its computer implementation, can provide decision support for the operators and save time when compared with the manual allocation of stands. The assignment task depends on several points of view that can be different from airport to airport and from operator to operator. So, the conception of a model of aircraft automatic allocation must be done in interaction with the operational team of a certain airport. The model proposed in this paper has been conceived for the case of the airport of Faro, although it can be easily adapted to any other airport. The model is based on the ASSIGNMENT mathematical programming technique. The construction of the ‘costs matrix’ of the Assignment Problem is one of the most important and complex aspects in this work. A good solution for the problem depends on the coefficients of the ‘costs matrix’, that must express the allocation conditions, many of them having a subjective nature. Moreover, the relative importance of the allocation criteria is not necessarily the same for all of them. These problems were overcome by a multicriteria model conceived in an interactive process supported by the MACBETH approach – ‘Measuring Attractiveness by a Categorical Based Evaluation Technique’. This is the main subject of this paper.