Thirteen principles for Airport Lean Design

The aviation industry is facing many challenges caused by the current air traffic forecasts, international policies, evolving technical references and regulations. The main issues to be confronted are capacity and quality of the service. Both challenges are related to the airport terminal projects and with their compliance to the architectural program in the beginning of the project. The projects are also dependent from the Project Participants - not the design team only - and the design methodology adopted for their development. In the Lean mind-set the project is considered as the final product of the product development process, therefore the application of Toyota Product Development principles can have interactions with common airport design practices. The interactions between Product Development principles and airport design practices are studied in a custom matrix. Thirteen principles for a better integrated lean airport design process are extracted from the interaction matrix. The matrix can also be used by airport project managers as a Lean Design Process Checker tool to define grey areas for improvement of the process.