IMHOTEP: Integrated Multimodal Airport Operations For Efficient Passenger Flow Management

Airport as a multimodal connection platform

The airport of the future is expected to become a multimodal connection platform, allowing travellers to reach their destination through the most efficient and sustainable combination of modes. It will also allow the airport and its surrounding region to make better use of their resources. The IMHOTEP project increased transparency in terms of airport transport systems information. This enhanced decision-makers’ ability to realize potential improvements, resulting in a four-hour (or less) door-to-door travel time in Europe.

A four-step methodological approach

The specific approach of IMHOTEP involved:

1. Proposing an operational concept that increased 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 involved 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 was 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 were conducted in direct collaboration with airports, local transport authorities and transport operators. They covered two airports with heterogeneous characteristics and serve different markets – Palma de Mallorca Airport and London City Airport.

The researchers developed computer models of the airports’ terminal buildings to simulate passenger trajectories once they enter the building. They then performed analysis to identify particular KPIs of interest for the project partners. They also used a simulation-optimization methodology that the group of Dr. Mujica Mota have been developing in recent years.

Education

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 were also 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 was funded by Horizon (H2020) and SESAR. The project involved a consortium of partners: Nommon Solutions And Technologies Sl (Spain), Ingeniería De Sistemas Para La Defensa De España S.A.-S.M.E. M.P. (Spain), Aimsun S.L. (Spain), Aena S.M.E. S.A. (Spain), Empresa Municipal De Transports Urbans De Palma De Mallorca S.A. (Spain), Amsterdam University Of Applied Sciences (The Netherlands), Cranfield University (The United Kingdom), London City Airport Limited (The United Kingdom), Technische Universitat Dresden (Germany).

Some of these partners were scientific collaborators, while the airports provided information and data for the simulations. An advisory board composed mainly of experts from IGAMT  also participated.

Contact

For more information, please contact Miguel Mujica Mota.