Back to Air Transport IT Review - Issue 1, May 2010
Handling change in airport operations
Faced with accelerated economic, business, social and environmental change, airports are having to adapt, to reconfigure themselves. Decision support tools to help airport core managers achieve the levels of change needed are being developed by the industry and a global network of universities.
Managing a major airport is like running a small town. There is an extraordinary array of complexity and permutation that needs to be assessed, planned for and actioned on a daily basis. There are impacts on airport efficiency and cost effectiveness for which airport management can plan but rarely influence.
Scenario groundwork will help prepare for sudden events such as adverse weather, loss of service due to problems at destination/despatching airports, or security-related events.
But airport management must also plan for more fundamental change as a result of constantly shifting business, environmental and socio-economic needs. If they can successfully identify the optimal strategies they should adopt in the face of these core issues, then they will be able to plan a future based on an effective 'through-life vision' of both design and management.
Three objectives
Backed by a number of industry partners, including SITA, we have been working with colleagues at the University of Cambridge1, with three key objectives, to:
- Provide guidelines for airports to be dynamically reconfigured to meet changing needs -- enabling the core management team to understand required capabilities and how these link to resources and infrastructure requirements.
- Help airport management to look daily at the operational work of the airport and how this can be reconfigured to meet daily changes in operation and deal with unexpected events and delays.
- Help airport management develop future migration strategies addressing, for example, changes in operational demand, or customized services for airlines and their passengers.
Progress on this work has just been made publicly available in the report "A first step towards reconfigurable airports"2.
The scope broadens
Airport operations are affected by a complex web of relationships.
- A broad range of stakeholders are involved in the smooth operation of the airport, with expectations -- and, crucially, contracts -- linked to the airport's managing authority. Each stakeholder relationship creates constraints and cost implications when considering any level of reconfiguration.
- There is a broad spread of airport operations, generally led by teams who may be working for more than one airport stakeholder.
- There are also three key airport value chains: passengers, baggage and cargo, and aircraft turnaround. But each stakeholder may have different priorities within the value chains.
To add further complexity to an already convoluted picture, there are five trends affecting all airports to a greater or lesser extent:
- Diverging airline business models (flag carriers / low-cost carriers).
- Contrasting passenger requirements (cost sensitivity / purpose of travel / expected service level).
- Ever more demanding cargo operations (pressures from cargo airlines, such as lead time reduction, network capacity, packing and loading).
- The use of new technology (some deriving from external stakeholders, such as new aircraft models, advanced security etc).
- The need to address carbon emissions and environmental concerns.
Searching for solutions
Considerable work has been completed over the past decade in understanding how manufacturing systems can be effectively reconfigured in both automated and non-automated systems. Many of the same principles apply to airport operations, particularly when it comes to assessing how trends and requirements impact on those operations. They include:
- Diversity, if a wider range of tasks is expected.
- Modifiability, if process changes are expected.
- Responsiveness if uncertainties and variations are expected.
- Fault-tolerance if disturbances and delays are expected.
With a clear understanding of these elements, it becomes more practical to move towards appropriate solutions.
Building the tools
Clearly, while decision support tools are of immense value in determining the most appropriate strategy for change, there is much that needs to be understood as to how to develop and use such tools.
As for the tool itself, we have been running a series of workshops with the sponsors of the programme, leading to the development of a methodology and the deployment of the operational decision support tool for airports.
The challenge is to ensure we can help airport management teams to achieve the required level of response and/or reconfigurability where needed and when needed -- and tying the results into real world management and decision-making processes.
The end result will be a process that can help airport management respond in a timely and effective manner to externally generated changes that will have a fundamental impact on their operations.
Duncan C. McFarlane
Alan Thorne
Distributed Information & Automation Lab,
Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge, UK
1. Distributed Information & Automation Lab, Institute for Manufacturing, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, UK. www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/dial.
2. 'A first step towards reconfigurable airports': Adrien Motte, Maurizio Tomasella, Alan Thorne, Duncan C. McFarlane. Available at www.aero-id.org/publications.htm.
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