A comparison of agent-based and discrete event simulation for assessing airport terminal resilience

摘要

Transport infrastructures form an important foundation for today’s daily activities. Failure in infrastructure systems due to external attacks or internal accidents does therefore have a serious impact on modern societies’ everyday life. In this context, resilience describes the ability of a system to adapt to or recover from an internal or external disruption. Concerning the resilience of airport terminal systems, no research is found in the literature yet. In this paper, a definition of the term resilience and of possible resilience indicators, which are specified according to current literature, sets the basis for the resilience assessment of airport terminal systems. We can model passenger flows in airport terminal systems with an agent-based simulation as well as a discrete event simulation. A quantitative analysis of terminal resilience is therefore realized with the simulation tools CAST Terminal and AnyLogic. We model a simplified terminal structure and explore the correlations between the input parameters of the system and the introduced resilience indicators. The input parameters are varied in order to determine the dependencies between the terminal characteristics, disturbance and the resilience of the terminal system. The basic terminal model will consequently enable an understanding of correlations between terminal resilience and the design parameters of the terminal model. Moreover, we discuss the suitability of the different simulation tools for terminal resilience assessment. In the future, we can extend the basic terminal model to more complex, real-world or generic terminal models. Long-term applications of resilience investigations are recommended actions for characteristic disturbances in order to minimize their impact on the terminal infrastructure.