Analysis of airport check-in operation and its reconfigurable design and management

With the fluctuation in the air transportation demand and the limited ability to increase the capacity and functionality of some key operations at the airport terminals, there are concerns that in the future, given their current designs, the airport terminals will not adapt timely and cost-efficiently to meet the demand. This limited ability causes the generation and propagation of issues in the terminal performances, such as inefficiencies and delays throughout the system, affecting the flow of the air-traffic and the airport’s quality perceived by the passengers. According to current research, the check-in is the operation within the terminals that represents its bottleneck and major constraint for the dynamic adjustments of the airport. Therefore, to improve the terminal performance and enable its adaptation to the trends coming from the external environment, this operation needs to be reconfigured. The evolving and uncertain requirements for the transforming check-in processes and the increasing fluctuations in the passenger air-traffic represent dynamic inputs for the check-in operation, which needs to be adapted instantaneously and at low costs. The ability to respond quickly to the dynamic environment by a rapid and possibly cheap change in the configuration of a process/system is known in manufacturing as reconfigurability. In this thesis, reconfigurability is investigated as a potential strategy to support the adaptation of check-in processes to the dynamic changes in requirements mentioned above. A case study of check-in operations at Manchester Airport in the UK helped to identify the key features of a reconfigurable check-in operation. This thesis discusses the design of the new check-in configuration at two levels: the hardware, i.e. the technologies adopted in the operation, and the software level, i.e. the way in which the capacity and functionality of check-in technologies should be estimated and allocated. Both the hardware and the software reconfiguration would improve the performance of check-in operation, especially in terms of a more efficient use of the resources. On the hardware side, the present thesis analyses new check-in technologies and proposes a novel methodology to measure the efforts required for moving from one process configuration to another. The methodology is based on the use of a tool called Design Structure Matrix. On the software side, new methods to estimate and allocate check-in resources (particularly check-in counters) were developed. These methods output a capacity plan that dynamically adapts to the demand, thanks to the joint adoption of Dynamic Programming and Integer Linear Programming techniques.