DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATION OF A GENERIC MODEL FOR AIRPORT TERMINAL PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

摘要

Airport stakeholders and policy makers face challenging strategic decision making problems for planning and coordinating highly complex processes and flows (i.e. passengers, well-wishers, greeters) that take place in an airport terminal. The airport terminal is a highly complex largescale system, as it involves a large number of entities, a large variety of types of services, complex interrelations between processes, variability and stochastic events. Current models for airport terminal performance assessment require substantial modelling effort in order to be customized to the configuration and operational environment of any airport terminal in a userfriendly way. Therefore, there is an urgent need for developing a generic, yet flexible decision support tool that will facilitate strategic decision making related to fundamental changes in the structure and operation of the airport terminal system. The objective of this paper is fourfold: i) to introduce the distinct characteristics of airport terminal planning and operations, ii) to describe the architecture of the proposed tool for airport terminal analysis, iii) to demonstrate the modelling process of the tool, using system dynamics, and iv) to present an overview of the tool capabilities. The proposed model enables a holistic evaluation of airport terminal performance, as opposed to optimizing the performance of individual airport terminal facilities.