Designing the Canadian airports or the future

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The airport passenger building is comprised of several interacting facilities and processes. With air transportation growing over 5% a year in the last few decades and still expected to grow at similar rates in the foreseeable future, the issue of providing enough terminal capacity is crucial to the well-functioning of the national airport system. The design of such buildings is a complex engineering problem that must be approached in an integrated manner, seeking optimal system performance, while allowing for flexibility in the design. In Canada, the problem is made even more complex by the existence of the U.S. customs and immigration pre-clearance at the principal Canadian airports. Two aspects of airport engineering have not been sufficiently or properly addressed in the existing literature. First, no attempt has been made to integrate the design of the passenger building and the airport airside. This is a critical shortcoming in airport research, as passenger and aircraft traffic are inter-related; both the airside and the terminal building compete for land; and the layout and operation of the airside will be affected by the layout and operation of the passenger building and vice-versa. Second, there has been little attention paid to the uncertainty in the design parameters. Typically, the design of airport facilities is based on detailed forecasts up to 20 years ahead. In a rapidly changing industry, those forecasts are very unlikely to be realised. A new approach is needed to support the long-term design of airport facilities with proper consideration of these uncertainties. In designing airport passenger buildings, different techniques may be required according to the nature and complexity of the problem. In this research, analytical models based on queuing theory, engineering economics and mathematical optimisation will be developed to help understand the intricate relationships between the main variables involved in the design of airport terminal facilities. Simulation, now a very well-established technique for the evaluation of complex transportation systems, will also be used extensively.