Airfield Operations shows 80% increase in capacity

Lanner develops the BAA Airside Capacity Planning Tool to improve Airport utilisation by 80%

With BAA expecting passenger volumes to increase by 800,000 year-on-year, they were faced with a challenge; the challenge of meeting increased demands on the Airport and ensuring the continued high level of customer service.

One crucial area was in Stand Planning. The complexity of plane movements, passengers and resources meant the current Microsoft Excel systems only gave daily ‘forecasts’ and tracked changes to stand allocations after the event. With no accurate tool with which to plan ahead, staff juggled stand allocations based largely on skill, experience and ‘gut feel’.

To know it could handle the expected 800,000 more people, Airfield Operations needed to be able to accurately predict stand allocation requirements; to routinely plan for busy periods and proposed timetable or stand capacity changes.

Lanner developed the BAA Airside Capacity Planning Tool, which could, in seconds, simulate stand allocation requirements for any combination of demand conditions and circumstances.

Results

• With the ability to consider alternative stand allocation or timetable strategies and identify the most efficient configuration to meet a particular requirement, BAA has seen an 80% improvement in stand utilisation.
• The Tool has also enabled BAA to quantify long-term stand requirements and optimise capital investment for additional stand capacity.
• BAA now analyses scheduling more often and responds to requests for information more quickly. The Capacity Planning Tool operates from standard BAA data, and the plan creation is fully automated, generating a visualisation of the plan and summary statistics in minutes.
• The speed of analysis and the ability to visualise the effect of deploying any particular stand or timetable configuration has improved communication amongst the many stakeholders. It provides other business areas with crucial data with which we can begin to realise an end-to-end accurate forecast of demand.

This user friendly, highly adaptable business tool, has given BAA the confidence to adopt tighter scheduling and the capacity to handle even more plane movements. Not surprisingly there is a great deal of interest from other airports.