Problem definition: In many resource scheduling problems for services with scheduled starting and completion times (e.g., airport gate assignment), a common approach is to maintain appropriate buffer between successive services assigned to a common resource. With a large buffer, the chances of a “crossing” (i.e., a flight arriving later than the succeeding one at the gate) will be significantly reduced. This approach is often preferred over more sophisticated stochastic mixed-integer programming methods that track the arrival of all the flights to infer the number of “conflicts” (i.e., a flight arriving at a time when the assigned gate becomes unavailable). We provide a theoretical explanation, from the perspective of robust optimization for the good performance of the buffering approach in minimizing not only the number of crossings but also the number of conflicts in the operations. Methodology/results: We show that the buffering method inherently minimizes the worst-case number of “conflicts” under both robust and distributionally robust optimization models using down-monotone uncertainty sets. Interestingly, under down-monotone properties, the worst-case number of crossings is identical to the worst-case number of conflicts. Using this equivalence, we demonstrate how feature information from flight and historical delay information can be used to enhance the effectiveness of the buffering method. Managerial implications: The paper provides the first theoretical justification on the use of buffering method to control for the number of conflicts in resource assignment problem.Funding: This work was supported by the 2019 Academic Research Fund Tier 3 of the Ministry of Education-Singapore [Grant MOE-2019-T3-1-010] and the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong SAR, China [Grant PolyU 152240/17E].Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2022.0572 .

中文翻译：

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资源分配问题中计划事件之间的缓冲时间：冲突稳健的视角

问题定义：在具有预定开始和完成时间的服务（例如，机场登机口分配）的许多资源调度问题中，常见的方法是在分配给公共资源的连续服务之间保持适当的缓冲区。有了大的缓冲区，“交叉”（即航班到达登机口晚于后续航班到达登机口）的机会就会显着减少。这种方法通常优于更复杂的随机混合整数编程方法，后者跟踪所有航班的到达以推断“冲突”的数量（即，航班在指定登机口不可用时到达）。我们提供理论解释，从鲁棒优化的角度来看，缓冲方法的良好性能不仅可以减少交叉次数，还可以减少操作中的冲突数量。方法/结果：我们表明，在使用下单调不确定性集的鲁棒和分布鲁棒优化模型下，缓冲方法本质上最大限度地减少了最坏情况下的“冲突”数量。有趣的是，在下单调特性下，最坏情况下的交叉数量与最坏情况下的冲突数量相同。利用这种等价性，我们演示了如何使用来自航班的特征信息和历史延误信息来增强缓冲方法的有效性。管理意义：