A framework for enabling an integrated and proactive decision making in airport systems

Airport systems stands for one of most important and essential asset within the transport system of a country. The air transport liberalization has promoted the air traffic growth with a consequential cost reduction to the passengers and air carriers. In turn, this growth is moving the main airports towards the saturation, affecting the performance and quality of the services provided to the passengers. Some analyses, indeed, foresee that the capacity of the airports, in the management of the aircrafts and passengers, will likely be the bottleneck of the air transport growth. Hence, airport capacity needs to be improved. The common and agreed view for succeeding to this goal moves to the optimization and orchestration of the available resources within the airport. To do that, the interoperability and cooperation among stakeholders, operating in the airport, often with different purposes, has to be rethought, along with the development of novel technological systems enabling and supporting this process. To this aim, the paper proposes a new framework that enabling the information interoperability on the top of classic data interoperability among heterogeneous stakeholders (often legacy systems) operating both in airside and landside area and provides a net-centric orchestration service capable of forecasting and promptly optimizing the choices of the stakeholders with the aim addressed to the airport performance as a whole.