  With the rapid development of airlines, airports today become much busier and
more complicated than previous days. During airlines daily operations,
assigning the available gates to the arriving aircrafts based on the fixed
schedule is a very important issue, which motivates researchers to study and
solve Airport Gate Assignment Problems (AGAP) with all kinds of
state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization techniques. In this paper, we study
the AGAP and propose a novel hybrid mathematical model based on the method of
constraint programming and 0 - 1 mixed-integer programming. With the objective
to minimize the number of gate conflicts of any two adjacent aircrafts assigned
to the same gate, we build a mathematical model with logical constraints and
the binary constraints. For practical considerations, the potential objective
of the model is also to minimize the number of gates that airlines must lease
or purchase in order to run their business smoothly. We implement the model in
the Optimization Programming Language (OPL) and carry out empirical studies
with the data obtained from online timetable of Continental Airlines, Houston
Gorge Bush Intercontinental Airport IAH, which demonstrate that our model can
provide an efficient evaluation criteria for the airline companies to estimate
the efficiency of their current gate assignments.
