Designing Efficient Taxi Pickup Operations at Airports

This paper provides a practical procedure for designing efficient taxi pickup operations at airports. How to do this effectively is an open question. Solutions are not available, and practices vary. They reflect different approaches to and lack of research on the subject. The solutions are often unsatisfactory. At many airports, passengers routinely suffer long waits outdoors, exposed to the elements, after a tiring journey. Such disagreeable experiences are avoidable. Designing efficient taxi pickup operations at airports is problematic. The peculiarities of the process preclude easy solutions. First, the process involves queuing, so system performance is a nonlinear function of the loads. Second, it features unstable transient situations, since travelers typically arrive in bulk over short periods. Third, traffic is significantly differentiated and consists of a wide variety of groups implying different service characteristics. Standard results from queuing theory thus do not have a useful application to this problem. The design process uses simulation that is based on detailed observation of local practices. It involves four steps: (a) detailed local measurements of the arrival of both travelers and taxis, and the service rates provided by taxis in different queuing positions; (b) creation and validation of a simulation model sufficiently detailed to account for these realities; (c) exploration of design alternatives to estimate the characteristics of the service they would provide; and (d) selection of a preferred design that properly balances efforts to minimize average and extreme wait times. The paper demonstrates the procedure through application to Lisbon International Airport, Portugal.SIMUL8 Corporatio

Development and Demonstration of a Modeling Framework for Airport Terminal Planning and Performance Evaluation

Airport stakeholders and policy makers involved in airport strategic planning, design, and operations have a vested interest in assessing how their decisions on alternative terminal layout concepts and operational policies affect overall airport terminal system performance. A considerable amount of research has been devoted to modeling airport terminal operations and performance evaluation. However, no aggregate model provides the capability of supporting strategic decision making while addressing the modeling requirements of a generic model that can capture the complexity of airport terminal processes and a flexible model that can be easily customized to reflect the configuration and operational characteristics of any airport terminal. The objective of this research was threefold: (a) to demonstrate the need for adopting a new approach for airport terminal modeling and performance analysis; (b) to present the overall methodological framework followed for the development of the proposed model, with discussion of the conceptual framework adopted, the airport terminal domain ontology developed, and the model architecture and design; and (c) to demonstrate the model capabilities through modeling and analyzing the Athens, Greece, International Airport terminal case under two alternative traffic demand scenarios