Across the world, millions of passengers, aircraft, and bags travel through airports every day. The modern airport is a complex ecosystem that depends on efficient airport planning to ensure its operations run smoothly,
Each phase of airport planning — capacity planning, budgeting, forecasting, short-term operational planning, and real-time optimization — plays a critical role in balancing capacity with demand, ensuring a seamless passenger experience, and responding to disruptions in real time.
In this article, we’ll cover what airport planning is, the three phases of airport planning, and why efficient planning matters for the modern airport.
What is airport planning?
Airport planning, or long-term operational planning, is the foundation of decision-making in the modern airport. It’s the process of designing and managing an airport’s infrastructure, services, and operations to ensure it meets future demands efficiently. The goal of airport planning is to create detailed plans that may still be adjusted on the day of operations.
The practice of airport planning involves a comprehensive approach that considers everything from physical space and resource allocation to regulatory compliance, staffing and operational efficiency.
Key aspects of airport planning include:
- Accurate predictions: Using historical data, seasonal trends, and industry factors to predict passenger, bag and aircraft volumes, flight schedules, and cargo demand for the future.
- Capacity estimation: Estimating the number of flights, runway usage, and gate occupancy to ensure the airport has the right resources to meet forecasted demand.
- Scenario planning: Developing multiple forecast scenarios to prepare for fluctuations in demand, economic changes, or unforeseen disruptions.
- Resource allocation: Assigning, gates, staff, and equipment based on forecasted demand and operational capacity.
- Contingency planning: Preparing for potential operational disruptions like weather, flight delays, or equipment failures with contingency strategies and backup resources.
- Operational efficiency: Coordinating with stakeholders, including airlines, air traffic control, and ground handlers, to keep operations running smoothly and minimize disruptions during the day of operations.
- Passenger experience optimization: Monitoring real-time conditions to reduce wait times, improve boarding processes, and handle crowd management for a better passenger experience.
The three phases of airport planning
Airport planning is divided into three phases: forecasting, planning, and real-time optimization. Each phase is crucial in developing airports that can handle evolving transportation needs.
1. Capacity planning and long term forecasting
The capacity planning typically looks 2-10 years into the future whereas the forecasting phase takes place anywhere between 14 days and 365 days in advance. The goal of forecasting is to predict future demand for air travel, including the number of passengers, aircraft movements, cargo volumes, number of bags, and operational requirements.
Forecasting takes into account factors such as:
- Historical data
- Economic indicators
- Airline industry shifts
- Tourism forecasts
- Local population growth
Forecasting uses statistical models, simulation tools, and machine learning algorithms to predict future needs. In doing so, it helps determine long-term infrastructure investments like runway extensions, terminal expansions, and parking facilities.
2. Tactical planning
Planning, or short-term operational planning, typically focuses on the next 24-72 hours, but can extend up to a week. This phase takes input from the forecasting phase, where passenger and bag volumes, flight schedules, and other relevant factors are predicted, and translates those forecasts into actionable plans for the immediate future.
The goal of the planning phase is to ensure that the airport can meet the predicted short-term demands and maximize operational efficiency.
Key tasks in the planning phase include:
- Staffing and resource allocation
- Stand and gate allocations
- Lane and counter opening plans
- Maintenance scheduling
- Contingency planning
The planning phase involves tight coordination between airlines, airport authorities, air traffic control, and ground services to ensure that every aspect of airport operations flows seamlessly.
3. Real-time optimization
Real-time optimization is the final phase of airport planning and focuses on managing airport operations as efficiently as possible in real time. This includes managing aircraft arrivals and departures, passenger flow, baggage handling, and ground services.
In the real-time optimization phase, advanced systems such as artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are used for optimizing gate allocations , staffing, and passenger wait times.
Integrated airport management systems are crucial for real-time optimization. They allow for informed decision making and real-time adjustments based on factors like weather conditions, traffic congestion, and flight delays. They also help to reduce bottlenecks at security checkpoints, improve boarding procedures, and enhance the overall passenger experience.
Why airport planning matters
With the ever-increasing demand for efficient air transportation of passengers and cargo alike, the importance of efficient airport planning grows more prominent every day.
Each of the three phases covered above is crucial because they’re highly interdependent. Any breakdown in one phase can create a ripple effect throughout the entire system:
- Forecasting: Under-forecasting demand can result in capacity shortages, leading to overcrowded terminals, runway congestion, and inadequate staffing levels, while over-forecasting can lead to unnecessary resource allocation, underutilized infrastructure and staff, and increased operational costs. Accurate forecasting provides the foundation for effective operational planning and real-time optimization, making it crucial for airport operations to run smoothly.
- Planning: Even with accurate forecasting, poor operational planning can lead to bottlenecks and inefficiencies, causing delays, longer security queues, and slower passenger processing times. Short-term planning translates the forecasts into daily operations, ensuring that all resources are optimally assigned. If this phase is ineffective, it can cascade into real-time operations, increasing the frequency of last-minute changes and making them more difficult to manage.
- Real-time optimization: No matter how good your forecasting and planning are, real-time disruptions are inevitable. Without effective real-time optimization tools, disruptions like flight delays and changes in weather conditions can cause cascading delays, passenger dissatisfaction, and overall inefficiency. This emphasizes the importance of being able to make quick, data-driven decisions in real time to keep your airport operations running efficiently.
Each phase influences the others, making seamless coordination across all three phases crucial for maintaining sustainable airport operations and handling increased traffic without causing delays or wasting resources in the process.
Connected Operations: The future of airport planning
Staff and passengers alike rely on each phase in the airport planning process to run smoothly. For that reason, connected operations are crucial across every area of airport operations.
Traditionally, airport operations are conducted in silos. Areas within the various operations are operated separately, making it difficult for areas to optimize and adapt dynamically to real-time changes. To optimize operations in the modern airport, their core operations can no longer be conducted in silos: they must be connected.
For this exact purpose, Copenhagen Optimization has developed Better Airport®: a cloud-based airport management SaaS platform that gives all airports, regardless of size, a simpler way to run core operations. It’s the solution that allows you to forecast accurately, plan efficiently, and execute confidently.
As a common operating platform, the system enables everyone you collaborate with, internally and externally, to easily access and use all functionality. Featuring nine core modules for airport optimization, Better Airport allows airports to mix and match modules to create a solution perfectly suited to the specific needs of the individual airport.
Every module can be connected, making it easy to forecast, understand, and plan passenger and baggage flows throughout the airport. We call this way of working Connected Operations — and we believe it’s the future of airport operations.
Optimize your airport planning with Copenhagen Optimization
Imagine an airport where your operations are connected; an airport where you can precisely predict your passenger and baggage flows, use data to plan with confidence and clarity, and optimize your operations in real-time. At Copenhagen Optimization, we want to help you achieve just that.
Would you like to learn more about the benefits of connecting your operations with Better Airport? Book a free demo below, or contact us at contact@copenhagenoptimization.com to learn more about how Better Airport can take your airport into the future.
