How to Build a Smarter Airport Terminal

During the end-of-year holiday travel crunch, many of us will wade slowly through the glacial process of boarding a flight. Every year airlines add extra flights to handle the spike with decidedly mixed effectiveness.

But to some forward-thinking engineers, the problem isn?t the planes. Airport terminals, with their labyrinthine security lines and seemingly endless hallways, aren?t built to get you to your plane on time. To ease the groan factor of waiting in airport lines, engineers are now making terminals smarter by employing new thinking and technologies, from optimized layouts to crowd-simulation software.

One of the newest examples is JetBlue?s Terminal 5 at New York?s John F. Kennedy (JFK) airport, which opened in 2008. T5 serves 250 flights daily and 20 million passengers annually, yet boasts impressively fast times for getting passengers from curb to plane and just-landed planes back up in the sky, according to Ray Quinn, a principal at Arup, the global professional services firm that worked with JetBlue in planning T5.

So how do you make a terminal smarter? Well before architectural and engineering firms settled on blueprints and construction plans, Arup built a digital version of the space and populated it with virtual people to see how it all works. Arup has used this approach in various other big-ticket projects, including the Fulton Street Transit Center and the 2nd Avenue Subway, both in New York, as well as the Union Station in Toronto and the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

To hone aspects of T5, Arup relied on an in-house software program called MassMotion. In the program, simulated people called agents are designed to act like the members of a crowd. They navigate a 3D terminal with a certain degree of intelligence, and how they move around is based on factors such as lighting and avoiding congestion?if one stairway is too packed, they might try the one down the hall. "MassMotion helps us at a very fine-grained level on the specifics of space, down to the exact width of a corridor or the exact amount of square footage along a travel path," Quinn says. "We can not only fine-tune, but also change elements in the model and see how people react."

Watching all those virtual people navigate the heart of the proposed airport terminal helped back up Arup?s vision of a simple interior design for T5. Rather than a confusing layout of multiple spokes and shuttle services to different gates, T5 resembles a triangle. A long, curved base provides ample curb space for passenger drop-offs and pickups. In the triangle?s center are ticketing, baggage, security, and major amenities. Twenty-six gates then appear along the terminal?s remaining two walls and down a pier extending from the triangle?s apex. This shape creates a bit of a funneling effect that steers departing passengers to their gates.

Modeling traffic flow also allowed Arup to address perhaps the worst part of air travel: getting through security. "Without question, one of the main complaints in large U.S. airport terminals is insufficient processing at security, which can lead to flight delays, congestion, and passenger stress levels," says Regine Weston, Arup?s global leader in aviation planning. To alleviate the problem of having passengers stand around with shoes in hand, T5 has the largest contiguous security checkpoint in the United States: a 340-foot-wide area with 20 lanes to keep lines short.

The farthest gate is then only a 5-minute walk from security, Weston says. All told, many customers can go through the whole curb-to-plane process in around 15 minutes, Weston explains, which is a third of the 45-minute span that the International Air Transport Association recommends as a best practice for world-class terminals.

Arup?s MassMotion modeling technology also helped to sell the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs JFK airport, on the wisdom of a cool new feature. Thanks to the T5 layout, lots of passengers are zipping through T5?s central 55,000-square-foot amenities area called the Marketplace. "Typically the goal is to reduce passenger flow, but the Marketplace brings everyone?departing, arriving, and transfer passengers?together," Weston says. That?s good for retailers and makes for an interesting hub of activity, and the "agents" in the MassMotion simulation allowed Weston to demonstrate that it wouldn?t end up in a traffic snarl.

Arup also used another clever bit of software, called SoundLab, to fix one other airport terminal problem: the unintelligibility of the public announcement system. To assess a building?s acoustics before it?s ever built, SoundLab incorporates a building?s dimensions, the sound-bouncing qualities of the wall and other materials, and background noise levels from people and machinery. The software guided Arup to select speakers that could adequately broadcast over the hubbub, Quinn says. (SoundLab also provided its services in designing New York?s National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center.)

Building the terminal of the future isn?t just about making the interior easier for passengers to navigate. It?s also about making the exterior easier for pilots to navigate. Pilots cruise around on the tarmac via dual taxi lanes instead of a single lane, allowing planes to taxi to and from gates simultaneously. "Practically, this means JetBlue pilots can avoid being trapped behind another aircraft when they are arriving or departing at their gate," Weston says.

Look for new terminals, as well as retrofits, to follow the T5 model. "There are only a handful of terminals that are as new and innovative as T5," says Tom Reich, director of air service development for AvPORTS, a private airport operating firm and aviation consultancy. "Fifteen years from now they will be the new standard."

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/news/how-to-build-a-smarter-airport-terminal?src=rss

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