Strategic Planning for Airport Systems: An educational perspective

Strategic Planning for Airport Systems: An educational perspective Paul Roling*, Sander Hebly†, Roland Wijnen‡, and Dries Visser§ Delft University of ...
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Strategic Planning for Airport Systems: An educational perspective Paul Roling*, Sander Hebly†, Roland Wijnen‡, and Dries Visser§ Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Delft, the Netherlands

I.

Introduction

The airport business is high-paced, dynamic and unpredictable. Airport decision makers are faced with the continual challenge of having to make strategic plans and business decisions regarding infrastructure, market positioning, and commercial activities at the airport. To support its educational program, the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering (AE) and the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management (TB) of the Delft University of Technology started an M.Sc. level course related to the various aspects of airport development. It was started in 2003 and is currently running for the fifth time. On average fifty students participate per year. Since 2005, the course is an obligatory part of the Aerospace Operation and Exploitation minor of the B.Sc program. Because of this, the course is now given twice every academic year. This course, ‘Strategic Planning for Airport Systems’, aims to explore the various aspects of the airport business. There are two goals. First, it aims to introduce students to strategic planning in private sector organizations, using the case of the airport business as an example. Second, it aims to provide students with an understanding of the complex interrelationships and interactions among airport capacity, airport demand, policy changes, investments, and environmental issues and the effects that changes in any of these can have on airport profits and performance. Using a policy analysis/system-modeling framework, the full range of airport strategic planning issues is addressed. Recommended literature for the course includes ref.1. The course consists of a series of lectures given by different lecturers, from various fields of expertise, and also includes homework assignments, which are directly linked to the topics of the lectures. The most important part of the course, and of the students’ grade, is a group assignment in which four or five students make an assessment for a US airport, with respect to the present and future. For this final assignment, they must use the Airport Business Suite (ABS), an in house developed decision support system for airport strategic operation (ref. 3 and ref. 4).

II.

Lectures

To instruct the students on the different subjects, the course consists of a number of lectures. Some of the subjects consist of one hour and some consist of two hours of lectures. Next to these subjects there is also a lecture to introduce them to working with ABS. A. Policy analysis Policy analysis, which can be defined as “Analyses that generates the information in such a way as to improve the basis for policymakers to exercise their judgment”, is an integral part of Strategic Planning for Airport Systems. The main goals of this introductory lecture are to teach the students how to: - Understand the objectives of the problem owner, the airport, and the stakeholders, which include airlines, service providers and people surrounding the airport - Select outcome indicators that span these objectives. Examples of these outcome indicators are revenues, costs, delays and noise contours. - Assess outcomes of alternative policies with a system of simple models; in this case the ABS. Policies can include changing the usage of runways, adding runways, depeaking schedules and expanding terminals. - Present results in a form useful to the problem owner and stakeholders in their final report. To make this more tangible an example of a real life policy analysis study, which was done for the future of Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, is given.

*

Research associate PhD candidate ‡ PhD candidate § Associate professor; AIAA Associate Fellow †

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B. Demand forecasting With respect to demand forecasting, the students are given a one hour introduction. One of the main aspects is to teach the students how to use past trends to assess future demand. Special attention is given with respect to transfer passengers, as these have large potential demand value for large (hub) airports. Events which have caused a large disturbance in demand, like September the eleventh, SARS, the Iraq war and oil crises are illustrated using past and present Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) forecasts. The way the ABS flight schedule generator creates future flight schedules, using peak days, distribution of flights over the day and different connected cities, is also discussed. C. Airside capacity In the airside capacity lecture the students are introduced to the aspects of airfield capacity: - Capacity constraining elements, including the apron, runways, taxiways and Air Traffic Control capacity - Aircraft classifications, such as weight class, wake vortex and noise classifications. - Basics of Air Traffic Management, with respect to the airspace structure and air traffic flow. - Airport capacity assessment, which is influenced by a number of factors such as runway usage, weather conditions, aircraft separation and noise constraints. With respect to capacity and delay modeling within ABS (Figure 1), the working of the FAA airside capacity model (ref. 2) and the estimation of delay using queuing models for arrival, push-back and departure is shown.

Figure 1: ABS Runway layout

D. Terminal capacity To give the students an impression of how airport terminals work the following aspects are discussed: - The terminal as part of the airport system. - Traffic structure, with respect to airport and airline type, and passenger types, with respect to destination, arrival, departure and transfer and business and tourist passengers. - Terminal configurations, including different types of layouts and level concepts - Passenger flows and peak hours with respect to different types of flows and arrival patterns. - Dimensioning of terminal facilities and how the capacity of facilities is calculated with respect to performance criteria, using a peak hour. Also an overview is given of how terminal capacity is calculated in the ABS, using IATA based calculations. The lecture is concluded with trends in passenger handling which may have a large effect in the way terminal operate are discussed, which includes systems like automated check in and biometric technology.

E. Environmental issues The two main environmental issues which affect airports are noise and emissions. This lecture introduces them to the challenges surrounding them. The history of noise legislation, the different sources of aircraft noise and different noise metrics are explained. For emissions, the different types of emission gasses and the surrounding metrics and legislations are discussed. As engines are one of the sources for noise and the main source of emissions, engine developments in this context are also illustrated. F. Economics Most of all, an airport is a business. This lecture gives an impression of how an airport is managed and financed. Subjects include forms of ownership and management, economic regulations, costs and revenues, including user charges and financing capital investment. How the FAA benefit-cost model (ref. 5) works and how to do a decision analysis is also shown.

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III.

Final assignment

For the final assignment the students have to do an assessment for an airport using the ABS. US airports are used as these generally have a lot of information available in the form of financial reports, FAA traffic forecasts and airport capacity enhancement plans. The goal is that to use available information to recommend network, runway configuration, terminal design and financial elements that are appropriate in order to achieve the CEO’s vision for the airport in 2025. The students are also encouraged to propose improvements which can be made to the ABS. The assignment is set out in the following parts: 1. Describing the airport and its base year situation in terms of its traffic schedule, available airside and landside capacities, its balance sheet, the weather patterns, noise compatibility issues and other relevant characteristics 2. Compiling a suitable traffic schedule for selected peak days using provided or self compiled timetables that can be imported into the ABS. 3. Identifying and preparing the various datasets needed to create an ABS case for the base year. All available runway configurations and weather patterns need to be identified. Geometric runway information is available through the FAA Integrated Noise Model (INM). If certain data cannot be found, educated guesses will have to be made. 4. Using ABS to conduct a capacity and delay assessment for both the airside and landside and identifying possible capacity bottlenecks. Aircraft gate occupancy and a capacity coverage chart, which describes the available runway capacity over a year, need to be included. 5. Conducting a noise analyses for the base year, using the ABS and INM. For this routes will need to be defined in INM. 6. Producing multiple demand forecasts for a future year with trend scenarios in ABS. These forecasts need to reflect on the different types of growth, with respect to peaks in the schedule, increases in passenger numbers and changes in aircraft types. 7. Describing the CEOs vision for the future with respect to the type of airport it should be, the potential customer, service levels with respect to airside delays and the terminal and environmental constraints. 8. Identifying policy options that might help achieve this vision. These options need to include at least depeaking flight schedules, adding an extra runway and expanding the terminal. 9. Evaluating the policies for the different scenarios using the ABS. Policy recommendations need to be developed and an INM noise impact study (Figure 2) needs to be done for the most recommended policy. 10. Conducting an Airport Benefit Cost analyses for a defined runway expansion project following the FAA guidelines for projects under the Airport Improvement Program. 11. Presenting and defending the policy Figure 2: INM Noise contour recommendations. In the past a large number of US airports have been examined. During the current course the airports which are under scrutiny are Atlanta (ATL), San Francisco (SFO), Los Angeles (LAX), New York (JFK and LGA), Newark (EWR), Seattle (SEA) and Detroit (DTW). To allow even more airports to be examined in the future we have recently obtained Official Airline Guide (OAG) data with respect to timetables.

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IV.

Final assessment example

A good example of an airport assessment is one done for San Francisco international airport (SFO). This report was made by a group of four students for the Strategic Planning for Airport Systems course in the final quarter of the academic year 2005/2006. This section contains a small compilation of their work. G. San Francisco International Airport San Francisco international airport is one of the USA’s busiest airports, handling both domestic flights and international connections. The airport has flights to destinations throughout the Americas and is a major gateway to Europe, Asia and Oceania. SFO is the busiest airport in the Bay Area and serves the city of San Francisco, Silicon Valley and the wider Bay Area. It is a mayor hub of United Airlines and might soon become the main hub of a new low cost carrier called Virgin America. According to the OAG schedule 2005, which is used, SFO has an average of 965 aircraft operations per day. The maximum number of aircraft handled per day is Figure 3: SFO Runway overview 1048. A total of 32.8 million travelers passed through SFO in this year. SFO operates with two crossing sets of closely spaced parallel runways, as illustrated in Figure 3. This poses an extra challenge, as the way these runways are used is not supported normally by the way the FAA airfield capacity model is integrated into the ABS. To solve this, the students had to adapt the separations and runway occupancy times to get capacity results that comply with published FAA benchmarks (ref. 6). There are four terminals at SFO, three domestic and one international. All the relevant parameters for these terminals, such as the curbside length, departure hall size, number of baggage reclaim devices and number of check in desks, are added up as a single terminal, as the ABS currently does not support multiple terminals. A. Airside capacity modeling To model the runway capacity, a total of five different types of operations were implemented, of which the usage depends on wind conditions. The most common of these configurations uses runways 28L/R for arrivals and 01 L/R for departures. This configuration is mostly used, if wind conditions permit, due to noise abatement. Other configurations include using 28L/R for both arrivals and departures, using 10L/R for departures and 19L/R for arrivals, using 19L/R for departures and 10 L/R for arrivals. Visibility conditions also have a large impact on operations at SFO. To simulate these, three different weather types are included for the normal configuration, as low visibility usually only happens at low wind speeds. These include visual meteorological conditions (VMC), marginal meteorological conditions and instrumental meteorological conditions (IMC). The benchmarks for these conditions are respectively 105-110, 81-93 and 68-72 aircraft movements per hour. B. Forecasts To get impression for the future operations at SFO will be like, forecasts are made for two years, 2015 and 2025. For each year two different growth figures, based on IATA forecasts, were used: • Low growth scenario, which assumes a 3% annual growth in the number of passengers • High growth scenario, which assumed a 6% annual growth in the number of passengers

Table 1: Passenger numbers for growth scenarios

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The effect of these growth figures on the number of passengers is illustrated in Table 1. This growth can occur in more flights or in larger aircraft used. To look at these effects, different percentages of aircraft growth, i.e. the growth accommodated by larger aircraft, are included in the scenarios. These percentages include 0% aircraft growth (network growth), which means all growth is accommodated by an increased number of flights, 50% (shared growth) and 100% aircraft growth, which means that the number of flights remains the same, only larger aircraft are used. C. Evaluation of policies To accommodate the future growth, a number of different policies are evaluated. These policies include: • De-peaking; additional flights are distributed over the day, so that the peaks in traffic demand diminish. • Adding a runway; a new runway is built, to increase the airside capacity • Terminal expansion; the terminal is extended to reduce capacity problems there.

Table 2: Delays with all policies implemented

These policies are evaluated in different combinations for the different scenarios. First of all the delay effects are computed. The results on delay for doing nothing and combining all these policy options for the different scenarios in 2025 are shown in Table 2. The effects on noise are also evaluated, by using INM to do noise calculations for a combination of promising policies. The INM noise contour for all policies combined is shown in Figure 4. As an airport is primarily a business, a benefit cost assessment is done for the extra runway, which is estimated to cost one billion dollars. For the low growth scenarios over a period of 25 years, which can be considered as the worst case scenarios, the network growth scenario results in an internal rate of return (IRR) of 4.0% and the shared growth scenario results in an IRR of 5.9%. The financial effect of adding a new runway thus looks promising, especially if larger aircraft are encouraged and traffic growth is higher than 3% per year.

Figure 4: implented

Noise contour with all policy options

D. Conclusions for SFO The conclusions are that a combination of de-peaking and adding a new runway have the best overall results for the future for all the most likely scenarios, even with 3% growth and a shared network growth. The terminal will also have to be enlarged. The noise levels will remain acceptable if de-peaking with an effective night time regime is applied.

V.

References

1

Neufville, R. de and Odoni, A., Airport Systems: Planning, Design and Management, McGraw-Hill, 2003 C. Ball and Wm. Swedish, Upgraded FAA Airfield Capacity Model, FAA/DF-81-001A, May 1981 3 W.E. Walker, N.A. Lang, J. Keur, H.G. Visser, R.A.A. Wijnen, U. Kohse, J. Veldhuis, A.R.C. De Haan, An Organizational Decision Support System for Airport Strategic Exploration, in Tung Bui, Henryk Sroka, Stanislaw Stanek, and Jerzy Goluchowski (eds.), DSS in the Uncertainty of the Internet Age, Publisher of the Karol Adamiecki University of Economics in Katowice, Katowice, Poland, 2003, pp. 435-452. 4 Roling, P.C. & Wijnen, R.A.A., Improvements to the airport business suite: A decision support system for airport development, planning and operations, In Proceedings of the 1st Int. Conf. Research in Air Transport, pp. 73-84. 5 http://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/policy_guidance/benefit_cost/ 6 http://www.faa.gov/events/benchmarks/2004download.htm 2

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