Airport Lean Design

The Aviation Industry challenge airports with capacity and quality demands. Airport Terminal Design is becoming more critical as a part of the aviation industry supply chain because it affects the operation phase of the airport, therefore capacity, efficiency and passenger experience quality. Traditional design methodologies based on schematic approaches are not sensible to the general variability of the operation phase. Expensive design errors showed the need to push design towards more integrated processes based on information sharing within the Design Team, Airport Owner, Authorities, etc. The research introduced in this paper proposes the experimentation of innovative methodologies and tools for Airport Design, aiming to simplify project activities, eliminate errors (wastes) and to improve the value of the design itself to the user. Such methodologies are identified as Lean Processes. The originality of the research is in its transfer to Project Design Management, integrating aspects of the operation phase since the inception of the design. Generating value during the design is crucial to identify needs and to convert them in design requirements and performance sets, i.e. project information. Consequentially, construction, operation and de-commisioning are driven by knowledge-intensive and model-based information. Lean methodologies enable an integrated approach throughout the whole project life cycle, increasing the reliability of the process. The aim is to define a Lean Design Methodology to be field-tested on international airport case studies. Integrated Lean Design goes through all the phases of the design and project life cycle, offering a general methodology that can be tailored according to the case studies through the tools. National and international airport terminal project case studies will be used for testing the methodology and its tools in the field. The expected results of this research are a project design and management methodology and design tools. BIM tools are seen as a technological backbone for project information management and documentation production in the life cycle, improving integration of the process and allowing coherence in project information creation and management. Areas for improvement of common practices based on Lean mindset principles are defined within this research.