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Building a baseline for landside modelling |
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A study by the Advisory Council for Aeronautical Research in Europe (ACARE) suggests that a three-fold increase of air traffic can be anticipated during the next 30 years. The European aviation industry will face a number of challenges to manage a traffic increase of this magnitude. The airport is an integral part of the air transport system managing a large number of processes. A key process is the management of the flows of passengers through the terminal to achieve optimum performance of the aircraft turn-around within airport operations.
The need for better prediction of the completion of aircraft turn-around has been identified as essential element of improving airport performance and is the subject of a study by the EUROCONTROL Airport Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) project. In this study, the Landside Modelling project incorporates the analysis of airport landside processes, their future evolution and subsequent development within airside CDM applications. This includes (but is not limited to) more accurate prediction of aircraft ready time resulting in improved prediction of take-off time, downstream sector load and arrival time at the destination airport.
Within the context of airport collaborative decision making (CDM), the Experimental Centre is working with available partners to model passenger processes throughout the air terminal. The aim is to understand the interaction with other airport processes, and investigate how new technology and redefined processes could be better integrated in the overall management of the airport, for example to reduce process time and increase predictability.
In the search for study partners, it was clear that such cooperation would require existing research experience in airport operations and the availability of a model already developed and validated so that research activities could start immediately.
Airport Research Centre (ARC) GmbH was selected to conduct the study using the CAST (Comprehensive Airport Simulation Technology) simulation software as an investigation tool. CAST is a 3D multi-agent based simulation tool developed for the simulation of airport landside and airside processes.
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CAST Demonstration Video [6.2 MB] |
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FRAPORT AG, the operator of Frankfurt airport, will ensure the validation of data used and the validation of the elements of the project.
This note contains a description of the baseline simulation model representing the status quo situation of the airport passenger processes. For validation purposes real input data of a reference airport have been used. With this model several simulation runs have been performed to investigate the effects of various modifications that may improve today’s performance and efficiency of the passenger processes in a terminal building.
The next step will expand the Landside Model to become one component of a model of all major airport processes with a view to using such a model, not only for validation of processes, but in the strategic planning process of airports, possibly also supporting the pre-tactical planning process.
The study will later look into the feasibility of operational use of such models.
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Last validation: 20/11/2006
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