Using Process-Oriented-Grouping and Linear Algebra to Optimize Resource Management

Abstract

Airport operation gets more complicated due to the increasing interconnectivity of the infrastructure and the dependency on advances in information and communication systems. There exist a manifold of different reasons for system failures of devices starting from short-circuits, hardware defects or malware infections reaching to power shortages or complete blackouts. Moreover, the increase of the number of devices within the airport infrastructure system leads to a tremendous demand of computational assistance systems for operations management. As most devices within the airport are directly connected to processes, there is a high demand for identifying and managing system failures immediately and increase the system resilience. Thus, we introduce process-oriented-grouping of network devices and use linear algebra to relate the impact of system state changes to airport processes, such as check-in, security checks et cetera. This connection between system state and processes is inevitable for a successful combination of computational approaches to determine physical state variations, induced by power grid instabilities and/or cyber-attacks, and process oriented simulation methods. Matrix relations between system states, process capacities, waiting times are given and applied to a small, at this state fictional airport infrastructure. This application shows that forecasting of quantitative values for airport processes is a beneficial tool for airport infrastructure management. Moreover, linear algebra properties prove to be a strong tool in analyzing network properties, such as infrastructure diversity and process capacities, which play a major role within resource management. However, at the moment our approach is only suitable as a supporting tool for human decision making. Nevertheless the approach can be enhanced as intelligent health monitoring system for airports.