The airport of the future is expected to become a multimodal connection platform, creating the conditions for travellers to reach their destination by the most efficient and sustainable combination of modes and allowing the airport and its surrounding region to make a better use of their resources. The goal of IMHOTEP is to develop a concept of operations and a set of data analysis methods, predictive models and decision support tools that allow information sharing, common situational awareness and real-time collaborative decision-making between airports and ground transport stakeholders. The specific objectives of the project are the following:

1. Propose a concept of operations for the extension of airport collaborative decision-making to ground transport stakeholders, including local transport authorities, traffic agencies, transport operators and mobility service providers.

2. Develop new data collection, analysis and fusion methods able to provide a comprehensive view of the door-to-door passenger trajectory through the coherent integration of different types of high resolution passenger movement data collected from personal mobile devices and digital sensors.

3. Develop predictive models and decision support tools able to anticipate the evolution of an airport’s passenger flows within the day of operations and assess the operational impact on both airport processes and the ground transport system, with the aim of enabling real-time collaborative decision-making between airports and ground transport stakeholders and enhanced passenger information services.

4. Validate the proposed concept and the newly developed methods and tools through a set of case studies conducted in direct collaboration with airports, local transport authorities and transport operators. The case studies will cover two airports with heterogeneous characteristics and serving different markets, namely the Palma de Mallorca and the London City airports.

The Role of Aimsun

Aimsun developed a ground-access microsimulation model with individual passenger travel time tracking, which made it possible to get reliable travel time predictions for passengers accessing or egressing the terminal under a wide range of circumstances, from a baseline business as usual case to severely disrupted conditions.

Disruptions can happen for a variety of reasons, from heavy traffic congestion to road controls, bad weather and a long etcetera. The ability to accurately predict the travel times for each individual user in the airport hinterland enables simulations of delay mitigation strategies such as traffic management actions around the airport, or changes in the public transportation capacity or frequency. 

Benefits to Customer

Choosing the right mitigation strategies means a better customer experience when disruptions do happen. Additionally, it will allow airlines to improve their decision making on how beneficial could be to delay a flight in order to wait for delayed passengers in future real-time applications. 

Thus, Aimsun is providing reliable travel time predictions to enhance the decision making for both hinterland access management and terminal passenger service.