So using Auto Planner I noticed that quite often it leaves these massive gaps between flights when scheduling, sometimes just barely shorter than another whole flight, effectively costing me quite a lot of money by not using the capacity I have. I encountered capacity usage of down to 50% in rare cases even below.
I just ran a comparison between manual slot to slot scheduling and autoplanner and with my 5 medium and 12 small gates Autoplanner cost me about $20000 a day which isn’t very surprising when one has a gap for two flights and it schedules one flight in such a way, the second won’t fit in by 5 minutes anmore…
(below is Autoplanner, above is mine)
Is there a way one could introduce a “maximum slot gap” similar to the minimum slot gap that exists already?
The auto planner currently obey the minimum flight separation set by the player and adds a random minute to it. This is to prevent it from scheduling multiple flights with exactly the same arrival time. It is also quite realistic for an airport not to have 100% gate occupancy at all time, not even Heathrow has that. However, in your case the gap is quite large so I suspect that it it tried to schedule a recurring flight but was unable to do so the following days. A reoccuring flight is always planned with the same arrival and departure time on multiple days.
I realize all that, yet over time this worsens and I have all my gates run this weird schedule.
Also, I tried the following: I had two 5x flights after one another, starting at the same day, thus, both were ending the same day and I still had it schedule a single flight in this 2 flight gap.I have enough contracts running to get more than enough flights offered. With Autoplanner it only utilizes 75-80 percent of the flights offered at most.
I also realize, that a 100% occupation isn’t realistic, the issue is, if I don’t meet 80% occupation I’m not making a profit, and reducing the gate count reduces my yield, since it’ll reduce the daily flights further.
Finally, I also have 22 GA stands which I would expect to have a occupancy of below 100% as well yet they are always completely full with only very few stands being free for very short times.
now, most airport have not a 100% occupancy rate for the gates mainly because the runways are limitting the aircraft coming in and going out, but I have plenty of runwaytime available.
However, in your case the gap is quite large so I suspect that it it tried to schedule a recurring flight but was unable to do so the following days. A reoccuring flight is always planned with the same arrival and departure time on multiple days.