Addressing Uncertainty in Airport Life Cycle

The paper highlighted the complexity of the stakeholders involved for strategic airport planning. Terminals have been considered mainly as “black box” for passenger and freight in- and output. The privatization of airports and the request for cost reduction and passenger comfort is left to the designers. The paper steps further and focusses on how to integrate the scenarios defined by the economic models into the design process, the structural implementation.. The “planning process” is thus considered as design and building of the infrastructure construction/amplification/modification introducing building phases as possible steps in time for a reevaluation of the final goal achievement on the basis of the update of vector input data. The vectors are meant to reach the strategic goals to the relevant measures that ought to lead eventually in time to the target model. This process is followed by an executive plan and finally by (several/consecutive) construction (phases). Each of these steps involves the interaction and the competition of interests of several stakeholders as well a different level of uncertainty in time. The loop verification on updated forecasting input may lead to a review of the strategic goals and/or a reshape of the infrastructure design process itself. Comments on partial results obtained by using scenario building techniques attempting to incorporate flexibility into airport planning and further attempts using simplified assessment methods during design development of the T5 low cost terminal will be reported during the presentation.