A simple process simulation model for strategic planning on the airside of an airport: a case study

Abstract

Strategic planning for airport design and operations is a challenging task, since it should consider a variety of alternative futures, their consequences for airport performance and possible strategies for ensuring that the airport meets its business objectives. Existing models and tools for quantifying airport performance require significant detailed data, substantial airport modelling effort and do not readily produce the information relevant to decision makers. Therefore, a fast and simple simulation model is needed that provides insight into the key performance indicators of an airport for different strategies across different futures. In this paper, a simple simulation model is developed, and different scenarios with increasing traffic and changing traffic distribution are simulated with a general simulation platform called ProModel, which can provide output data for airport capacity evaluation and a bottleneck checking. Case study shows that the model can be easily executed and proved to be feasible to quickly generate interest results for decision makers.

Keywords:

• capacity evaluation
• strategic planning
• process simulation
• bottleneck checking
• queue size

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71103034) and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK2011084). The authors are also very grateful to the two experts from Fraport AG, Bernhard Dorothée and Sabrina Goldhahn. Their constructive comments and suggestions have been very helpful in improving the paper. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the paper.