Assessing the Efficacy of Adaptive Airport Strategic Planning: Results from Computational Experiments

Airport development is increasingly difficult. One of these difficulties stems from uncertainty about future developments. Currently, airport development relies on Airport Master Planning (AMP). The goal of AMP is to provide a detailed blueprint for how the airport should look in the future, and how it can get there. However, among others because of the uncertainty, Master Plans often perform poorly. Alternatives to Airport Master Planning have emerged in the literature. The central idea of these alternatives is to have a plan that is flexible and over time can adapt to the changing conditions under which an airport must operate. We call such an approach Adaptive Airport Strategic Planning (AASP). However, AASP has not yet been applied in practice. One important reason for this lack of application is that its efficacy has not yet been established. In this paper, we apply Exploratory Modeling and Analysis, which uses computational experiments, to assess the efficacy of AASP across a large range of possible futures, for the case of Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. The results show that, given the same uncertainties, the range of outcomes from the Adaptive Plan is smaller then that of the static Master Plan. So, the Adaptive Plan will expose an airport less to negative outcomes. Furthermore, in those cases in which the Master Plan produces preferable outcomes, the difference in performance compared to the Adaptive Plan is rather small. Moreover, AMP is better than AASP for only a small range of future conditions. These three findings together suggest that AASP minimizes the downside risk without significantly reducing the upside potential. As such, the findings suggest that AASP should be preferred to AMP for airport strategic planning. Airports around the world operate in an increasingly uncertain environment. Airlines are able to change their network structures overnight. The oil price, flu epidemics, and financial and economic woes further add to the volatility of aviation demand development. Combined with tensions between economic and environmental impacts, this makes airport strategic planning a challenging task. Airport strategic planning (ASP) focuses on the development of plans for the medium to long-term development of an airport. Strategic planning is defined as 'the managerial activities that produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what the organization is, what it does, and why it does it' (Bryson, 1995). Strategic planning can be done-3-in many different ways. In airports, the dominant approach is Airport Master Planning (AMP). …