The Airport Business Suite: A Decision Support System for Airport Strategic Exploration

Abstract

* Associate Fellow AIAA, Lecturer † PhD. Researcher ‡ Professor § Airport Consultant ** Research Associate ABSTRACT The airport business is dynamic, competitive, complex, and unpredictable. Development and growth of any large airport depends on its ability to balance business realities, long-term expansion requirements and societal requirements. TU Delft Airport Development Center (TUD-ADC) is developing an integrated set of models, called the Airport Business Suite (ABS), that will help advisors involved in Airport Strategic Exploration (ASE) to quickly and easily explore future scenarios and policy options, improve understanding and insight into the main business drivers and risk factors, and generate information for decision making in an efficient, effective, and consistent manner. The ABS is to be a generic set of software tools that can be customized to help any airport address a wide range of issues under a wide variety of circumstances in situations of high uncertainty. It is a computer-based system for decision support that will enable users to obtain, through a graphical user interface, consistent information about all facets of the airport’s business (for current and future situations) at the desired level of aggregation. This paper describes the ASE process, model development, ABS development, the initial ABS prototype and planned future developments. It focuses not on the individual pieces of the ABS, but on its overall capabilities and how the individual pieces were combined into a consistent, integrated organizational decision support system. It describes the tying together of models and the integration of a human decisionmaker into the system of models. A working prototype of the ABS model system has been built and tested for a hypothetical airport. Moreover, it has been used for educational purposes in our course ‘Strategic Planning for Airport Systems’.