Do chaotic conditions for landside airport processes translate into chaotic airside disruptions?

Abstract

A broad range of events occur every day at every airport. Some events have the potential to lead to degraded airport performance and impact not only the local airport operations, but may propagate into the air transportation network. The severity of the impacts may additionally vary under different conditions, although the underlying event may appear to be the same. Ongoing research analyzes the events that occur on the airport landside, focusing on events that have their roots on passenger, cargo and baggage processes, not addressing multi-modal aspects. The conditions that prevail and cause or influence these events are identified and categorized, together with the event. A differentiation will be applied, mainly by severity of the event, trying to cluster the events and to identify the most severe ones, that ultimately lead to chaos inside the terminal and thus having a significant impact on the overall airport operations. Depending on the event, varying mitigation and management strategies are applied nowadays. The research will address whether the categories have common approaches to mitigate the impacts or if every event is so unique it requires individual treatment. At most airports the application of the mitigation measure may appear to be well coordinated, but due to the still existing lack of cross-stakeholder information exchange, the well-intended approach may not develop its full potential. Initiatives such as Airport Collaborative Decision Making (A CDM) increase the intra-airport data exchange, but it is still suffering from the landside-airside silo approach. Total Airport Management (TAM) and its successor Performance Based Airport Management (PBAM) address the airport as a holistic system of systems. Based on the landside identification, the impact on the airport airside and the resulting traffic flow and thus air traffic network will be discussed and it will be analyzed, whether these landside categories translate into comparable airside groupings. Similar to the mitigation measures for passenger, cargo and baggage processes, potential mitigation measures on the airport airside are thus identified and, consequently, the similarities clustered. The biased assumption, that only disruptions in passenger processes exert influence on the airside will be analyzed and the potential influence of cargo and baggage processes discussed. Comparing both, event impact and proposed mitigation measure approaches, these will be analyzed from the holistic PBAM approach. An attempt is pursued to answer if it is feasible to present pre-defined counter-measures for any of the groups and how these need to be configured or tweaked to be applied to the potential situations, ideally sketching the applicability of out of the box management solutions to provide a pro-active handling of degraded situations based on identified bottleneck events.