Toward Baggage-Free Airport Terminals: A Case Study of London City Airport

Nowadays, the aviation industry pays more attention to emission reduction toward the net-zero carbon goals. However, the volume of global passengers and baggage is exponentially increasing, which leads to challenges for sustainable airports. A baggage-free airport terminal is considered a potential solution in solving this issue. Removing the baggage operation away from the passenger terminals will reduce workload for airport operators and promote passengers to use public transport to airport terminals. As a result, it will bring a significant impact on energy and the environment, leading to a reduction of fuel consumption and mitigation of carbon emission. This paper studies a baggage collection network design problem using vehicle routing strategies and augmented reality for baggage-free airport terminals. We use a spreadsheet solver tool, based on the integration of the modified Clark and Wright savings heuristic and density-based clustering algorithm, for optimizing the location of logistic hubs and planning the vehicle routes for baggage collection. This tool is applied for the case study at London City Airport to analyze the impacts of the strategies on carbon emission quantitatively. The result indicates that the proposed baggage collection network can significantly reduce 290.10 tonnes of carbon emissions annually.

Three airports

The airport terminals in Perm, Saratov and Kemerovo created by Asadov Architectural bureau are presented. General concepts of complexes, architectural and interior solutions for passenger terminals, as well as elaboration of design codes of administrative and technical buildings are given. Particular attention is paid to passenger comfort and safety.

infrastructure

The darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea covered the city hated by the procurator... М. Bulgakov. The Master and MargaritaThe seventh airfield subzone covered our beloved city. Construction was stopped, and engineering was frozen. Now we have as much free time as we need. And while Irkutsk is struggling with the mistakes of previous administrations, let's see how new air terminals are opened one by one in the regional capitals of the country: Kemerovo, Saratov, Perm... The first one we saw was LEONOV in Kemerovo. And we saw it not online, but live, when we arrived at the Festival “Zodchestvo in Siberia”.The object of the issue is not a frequent section in PB. This issue contains several significant infrastructure facilities by Moscow authors. Airport terminals in three Russian regional capitals (41) and the Nizhegorodskaya transport hub in Moscow (63).The main Siberian festival of this autumn is a regular festival “Zodchestvo in Siberia” held in the first decade of September in Kemerovo (15-36). It is noteworthy that the main focus of the work of the key speakers of this festival, Nikolay Shumakov and Timur Bashkaev, is on transport infrastructure facilities. So the stars are aligned for us to talk about it, about INFRASTRUCTURE.The infrastructural crisis has hit fully half of the inhabited world. The gigantic transport, energy and information systems created in the middle of the last century have exhausted their resources. Mikhail Mishustin's government is adopting an ambitious plan to invest tens of trillions of rubles into the country's infrastructures. Joe Biden's government is discussing a similar plan that costs trillions of dollars. Meanwhile, it turns out that both the philosophy and methodology of infrastructure design have fundamentally changed and now require a deep rethinking. Along with the burning issues, however, we do not forget about anniversaries. The new issue of PB opens with a diptych devoted to the 80th anniversary of our regular author Alexander Rappaport.

Potential Toxic Effects of Airport Runoff Water Samples on the Environment

Despite the positive aspects of the intensive development of aviation, airports are considered large-scale polluters. Pollution caused by runoff water (stormwater) is one of the major problems related to airport operations. The aim of this study was to characterize the potential toxic impact on aquatic life from runoff water discharges from four international airports in Europe. Samples of stormwater were collected at airports with different capacities of passenger movement in four seasons of the year from 2011 to 2013. Within the ecotoxicological analyses, a battery of biotests incorporating organisms of different trophic levels (Microtox® test, Thamnotoxkit F™) were used. A relatively high number of runoff water samples collected at the investigated airports in Europe was recorded as having very high acute hazard (16.8%), acute hazard (27.7%), and slight acute hazard (18.1%) levels. The results of the research indicate that winter and autumn present a greater toxic threat than the rest of the year. The highest number of toxic samples was observed for samples collected in the de-icing area, the runway and the vicinity of airport terminals. The ecotoxicological assessment applied in this research can be used as a tool for assessing the environmental effect of airports.

Walk the Line: Optimizing the Layout Design of Moving Walkways

A moving walkway (also denoted as moving sidewalk, travelator, autowalk, pedestrian conveyor, or skywalk) is a slow moving conveyor that transports standing or walking people horizontally over a short to medium distance. Constantly moving walkways have a long-lasting tradition especially inside large buildings, such as airport terminals and railway stations. Novel technological developments allow to accelerate walkways in their middle sections up to 12 km/h, while still providing a safe and much slower entrance and exit. Furthermore, first applications of moving walkways as environmentally friendly and space-efficient alternatives for urban public transport exist. In this context, our paper aims to support the layout design of moving walkways with optimization. Given a straight corridor (e.g., an airport terminal) and the passenger flows within the corridor (e.g., among gates), we aim to optimally place bidirectional walkway segments. We show that the resulting optimization problem is efficiently solvable by dynamic programming even if multiple relevant extensions, such as multiple objectives, budget constraints, and minimum safety distances, among subsequent segments are relevant. We apply our algorithm to explore the impact of constantly moving and accelerating walkways on total travel times and benchmark solutions without walkway support in a real-world case study. Our results reveal that wrongly placed walkways may considerably slow down passenger transport, but a very simple design rule leads to near-optimal results.

Systemic Agent-Based Modeling and Analysis of Passenger Discretionary Activities in Airport Terminals

Discretionary activities such as retail, food, and beverages generate a significant amount of non-aeronautical revenue within the aviation industry. However, they are rarely taken into account in computational airport terminal models. Since discretionary activities affect passenger flow and global airport terminal performance, discretionary activities need to be studied in detail. Additionally, discretionary activities are influenced by other airport terminal processes, such as check-in and security. Thus, discretionary activities need to be studied in relation to other airport terminal processes. The aim of this study is to analyze discretionary activities in a systemic way, taking into account interdependencies with other airport terminal processes and operational strategies used to manage these processes. An agent-based simulation model for airport terminal operations was developed, which covers the main handling processes and passenger decision-making with discretionary activities. The obtained simulation results show that operational strategies that reduce passenger queue time or increase passenger free time can significantly improve global airport terminal performance through efficiency, revenue, and cost.

An Accelerated-Time Simulation of Queues at Ticket Offices at Railway Stations

Although nowadays many railway tickets are bought online, still many are bought through rail appointed travel agents and ticket offices at stations. There are several works on microscopic and accelerated-time simulations, some of them related to the topic of this paper, treating passengers movements in railway stations (both of general purpose and also with a focus on specific topics like evacuation, stations design, ticketing, etc.). We focus on a very specific topic: modelling queuing at ticket offices at a main Spanish station where “AVE” (“High-Speed”), “Larga Distancia” (“Long-Distance”), “Media Distancia” (“Middle-Distance”), and “Cercanías” (“Suburban Services”) dedicated windows exist. The existence of “Last Minute” desks is also considered. The goal is to provide the user with a tool that allows to choose the best option for windows distribution along time, after different microscopic simulations based on given data and windows possible distribution are performed (as done in a previous work of one of the authors for airport terminals check-in counters). Special attention is paid to “Last Minute” windows and shared windows (for example simultaneously selling tickets for “Larga Distancia” and “Media Distancia”). Input is given by arrival curves or can be generated by the package. The output is the detailed situation of any window at any moment and the evolution of queues by train or window type. There are different further possible extensions of this work. The implementation has been developed in a computer algebra system in order to minimize the development time.