Economic Challenges of the holistic approach to Airport Management

Kurzfassung

The presentation will briefly introduce into the paradigm of Total Airport Management, where a cross-stakeholder collaborative and cooperative airport management approach covering airport airside and landside and ideally intermodal transportation links are considered. Total Airport Management (TAM) for hub and big airports foresees a central collaboration platform called Airport Operation Center (APOC), usually implemented in a large office room accommodating representatives of all relevant airport stakeholders. In this physical room not only technical systems are provided for the operators, but as well the opportunity of collaboratively working close to each other and fostering communication and increasing situation awareness significantly. Problems at the airport usually affect several stakeholders along the problem chain, early awareness offers mitigation measures and better coordination due to proximity of aware decision makers allows for better and coherent implementation of action plans. Implementation of an APOC and running the operations will create a new set of costs. These will be different in height for the different stakeholders. Most probably the Airport Operator will be the entity to provide the facilities and systems as some kind of paid for service. The change management process that the stakeholder companies have to undergo to incorporate the APOC operations into their daily operational processes and way of working will produce various costs (e.g. change management, training, operational). Management structures probably have to be adjusted. These considerations have not been discussed adequately or analysed holistically. In SESAR 2020 the project PJ.04 Total Airport Management started the development of Benefit Impact Mechanisms as the first stage of a Cost Benefit Analysis, identifying the different aspects for stakeholders; results are not to be expected before the middle of 2022 though, when the maturity reaches the performance assessment stage (following V3 of E-OCVM). Nevertheless, since the main concept comes from a European background, the applicability and possible costs and management changes e.g. in Asian countries is completely unknown yet and will not be addressed by PJ.04. This presentation shall foster the initial discussion around TAM in Asia (Japan); provide insight into TAM and the required research to make TAM in Japan an attractive Airport Management philosophy in view of the upcoming future traffic challenges. Especially considering the rising Air Traffic Volume that is predicted, intermodal airport management philosophies need to be researched and the close proximity of a variety of Japanese airports and the existing high speed railway infrastructure could provide multiple solutions to capacity shortfalls at single airports, allowing for more flexible use of infrastructure and an increase passenger comfort due to reliability of services.