Towards a resilience assessment framework for the airport passenger terminal operations

Airport terminals can generate and intensify the undesired phenomena that take place on transportation networks in the wake of disruptive events. The more resilient a terminal is, the more easily it will bounce back to the desired state, causing less nuisance to the users. In this study, we expand the state-of-the-art airport terminal resilience assessment through fast-time simulation and tailored resilience metrics. From the point of view of simulation, we establish delay management strategies based on flight schedule alterations as a response to a disruptive event. In the baseline scenario, no disruption is set, whereas passenger arrival to the airport is blocked for 1 or 2 h in the disrupted scenarios. A previously verified and validated simulation model of a Brazilian domestic airport was used to represent the passenger departing flow, encompassing check-in and security screening. From the resilience perspective, a systematic assessment procedure for new resilience metrics is unveiled, providing means for exploring the metrics’ formulations and their relationship to the operational strategies. Following the simulation runs, resilience metrics for individual passenger and aircraft delays were investigated, something yet scarcely explored in the literature. The results show that the proposed metrics deliver significantly different outcomes from those associated with the current literature. Consequently, we can conclude that a resilience assessment concerning the airport terminal that disregards individual delays may be missing important information. The systematic approach we propose is a contribution in that sense, even though this topic requires more research, considering the vast nature of the possible disruptive events and their subsequent operational impacts.