IMHOTEP: Integrated Multimodal Airport Operations for Efficient Passenger Flow Management

A four-step methodological approach

The specific approach of this project involves:

1. Proposing an operational concept that will increase an airport’s collaborative decision-making to ground transport stakeholders, including local transport authorities, traffic agencies, transport operators and mobility service providers.

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

3. Developing predictive models and decision support tools to anticipate the evolution of airport passenger flows within the day of operations, and assess the operational impact on both airport processes and the ground transport system. The ultimate goal here is to enable real-time collaborative decision-making between airports, ground transport stakeholders and passenger information services.

4. Validating the proposed concept and newly-developed methods and tools through a set of case studies. These case studies will be conducted in direct collaboration with airports, local transport authorities and transport operators. They will cover two airports with heterogeneous characteristics and serve different markets – Palma de Mallorca Airport and London City Airport.

We will develop computer models of the airports’ terminal buildings to simulate passenger trajectories once they enter the building. We will then perform analysis to identify particular KPIs of interest for the project partners. We will also use a simulation-optimization methodology that the group of Dr. Mujica Mota have been developing in recent years.

Going beyond collaborative decision-making

This project is led by Dr. Miguel Mujica Mota, Associate Professor from AUAS as the principal investigator.

It is a two-year project carried out within the AUAS’ Aviation Academy lectorate with a Horizon (H2020) / SESAR grant. It involves nine international partners (for different tasks) and will end in the summer of 2022. As principal investigator, Dr. Mota and the team will focus on developing airport simulation models to evaluate the impact of ATM information. This information and the models will be combined with other modules, e.g. data or optimization libraries, developed by European partners. The project has a total budget of EUR 2 million.

“The European Commission wants to invest in projects that investigate ways to make the transport system more efficient,” says Dr. Mota. “Our project goes beyond collaborative decision-making, to propagate information from air transport systems to the public transport network for passenger benefit.”

Clear societal benefits in terms of European travel times

This project will increase transparency in terms of airport transport systems information. This will enhance decision-makers’ ability to realize potential improvements, resulting in a four-hour (or less) door-to-door travel time in Europe.

Furthering education and knowledge transfer

This project is part of the lectorate Airport and Airspace Capacity. In terms of education, this research can serve as a case study for reducing variability and sharing information to improve the performance of systems. A variety of deliverables will also be produced at international conferences (such as the Winter Simulation Conference, Sesar Innovation Days, MULTILOG or EUROSIM) and in reports to the European Commission.

Funding and partners

This project is funded by Horizon (H2020) and SESAR. The project involves a consortium of partners:

1 NOMMON SOLUTIONS AND TECHNOLOGIES SL (Spain)
2 INGENIERÍA DE SISTEMAS PARA LA DEFENSA DE ESPAÑA S.A.-S.M.E. M.P. (Spain)
3 AIMSUN S.L. (Spain)
4 AENA S.M.E. S.A. (Spain)
5 EMPRESA MUNICIPAL DE TRANSPORTS URBANS DE PALMA DE MALLORCA S.A. (Spain)
6 AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCES (the Netherlands)
7 CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY (the United Kingdom)
8 LONDON CITY AIRPORT LIMITED (The United Kingdom)
9 TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAET DRESDEN (Germany)

Some of these partners will be scientific collaborators, while the airports will provide information and data for the simulations. An advisory board composed mainly of experts from IGAMT will also participate.

Publications and events

There will be publications in international journals and at prestigious conferences like the Winter Simulation Conference, Multilog Conference, Sesar Innovation Days or EUROSIM.