Passenger terminal design

The standard procedures for sizing the spaces for passenger activities in airport terminals are unsatisfactory in that they easily lead to expensive errors. The essential difficulty lies in the nature of the process, and in particular with the several formulas which specify the area per passenger in different parts of the builidng. The process and these formulas are insensitive both to the variations in the operational characteristics of terminals and to the overall variability in the level and nature of the traffic. This paper presents practical procedures for incorporating such considerations into terminal design, based both on theory and on experience internationally at major airports. The approach builds upon detailed consideration of the sequences of flows of the passengers, their likely dwell-time in each facility, and their psychological response to the configuration of the spaces. The overall objective is to create flexible designs that use space efficiently under the broad range of conditions that may prevail. It entails an iterative process of exploring the response of design options to different patterns of loads. This approach invites computerized models of the performance of terminals with spreadsheet-like capability to answer ‘what-if’ questions rapidly.