Research Roadmap in the Area of Airport Operations and Maintenance (2019)

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1 1 Introduction The Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP), is a research program of the Transportation Research Board (TRB), which is in turn part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NAS). The ACRP, now over a decade old, is an “industry-driven applied research program that develops near-term, practical solutions to problems faced by airport operators” (TRB, 2018), and is sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The ACRP was developed to investigate problems not currently being addressed by other federal research programs, and has developed a reputation for excellence in research since its inception in 2006, largely attributable to its focus on collaboration with industry stakeholders. ACRP relies on input and cooperation from industry stakeholders, such as airports, air carriers, trade associations, consultants, and state and local government officials, for both the development of research problem statements, and to serve on project panels to direct the research. Over the past twelve years, ACRP has published (and/or in the process of developing) well over 400 research reports, synthesis reports, legal digests and web-based tools based on the interests and input of industry practitioners. 1.1 Project Background The airport industry has always faced a variety of challenges, problems and opportunities for improvement in the field of operations and maintenance. Some of the challenges have persisted over time and others are new, arising and resolving over time with the continued evolution of technology, practices, materials, and the changing needs of airport stakeholders. In order to maintain a steady supply of high quality research ideas to address these challenges, the ACRP has undertaken the development of five year, strategic research roadmaps in several topic areas. One such is ACRP Project 11-02/Task 29, “Research Roadmap in the Area of Airport Operations and Maintenance”. As stated in the Request for Proposals, a “research roadmap outlines a research agenda that will guide the development of problem statements flowing into ACRP and can provide answers to current questions, reduce uncertainties, and provide a sound approach for future research projects”. The objective of this project is the development of a 3 to 5-year, prioritized research roadmap that identifies gaps in knowledge and research ideas in the area of airport operations and maintenance. The research roadmap will enable industry stakeholders to develop problem statements and assist the ACRP Oversight Committee (AOC) in selecting projects for funding. The research roadmap will be designed for broad distribution via the internet, and will integrate with ACRP’s online platform for the collaborative development of research statements, the IdeaHub. The Operations and Maintenance (O&M) Research Roadmap considers the main airside and landside challenges relevant to airport practitioners today, as well as challenges expected to emerge over the next several years. It identifies several high-level themes as well as a number of sub-topics in order to categorize individual research ideas. The intent is for the individual research ideas to serve as starting points to be developed into complete problem statements over the next five years. The roadmap provides the reader with an understanding of the main topics of interest in this field, how the ideas relate to one another, and how the research ideas address overarching industry goals and objectives. In order for this roadmap to accurately reflect the needs of industry and address the key challenges in the fields of operations and maintenance, two critical components were required. First, a thorough review of existing and planned research in these areas was completed to understand what information is currently (or soon to be) available, and where knowledge gaps exist. The ACRP and other TRB cooperative research programs have conducted a number of relevant studies in these topic areas over the past several years, which were reviewed. In addition, the FAA has a significant body of research relevant to airports which was surveyed. Other governmental agencies, trade associations, the academic community were all useful sources of information. The roadmap builds off of these existing sources to ensure that there is no duplication of efforts in future ACRP research. Second, a robust stakeholder engagement effort was critical to capture the current and emerging challenges for airports of all sizes in the areas of operations and maintenance. During the development of the roadmap, a diverse set of airport practitioners, consultants, service providers, airlines, researchers and government officials were

2 contacted and interviewed, in order to gather information about issues of concern. The roadmap is a reflection of the common themes and ideas generated during the stakeholder engagement process. The primary audience for this research roadmap includes ACRP leadership and staff, airport management and staff, airlines, consultants and regulators. The expected outcome of this project is a strategic research plan that can be used to develop impactful research projects over the next several years. 1.2 Integration with ACRP IdeaHub The need for a consistent supply of high-quality research ideas fueled the development of ACRP’s research roadmap projects, but also provides the foundation for another strategic initiative of ACRP, IdeaHub. IdeaHub is the recently launched online platform for problem statement development that allows users to effectively collaborate on ideas, vote on preferred research topics, and follow the process from start to finish in a transparent manner. Both IdeaHub and the research roadmaps share a common goal of identifying current and emerging challenges in the airport industry, and converting these challenges into problem statements to effectively guide future research spending. The development of the research roadmaps occurred in parallel with the launch of IdeaHub. While both initiatives share the same objective (feeding the research idea pipeline), IdeaHub is geared towards collecting problem statements for current issues and challenges while the research roadmaps look further into the future to identify continuing and emerging trends the industry. One key observation that the research team made during the development of the research roadmaps is that many emerging challenges span multiple areas of an airport’s business objectives and operations. The team identified a corresponding need for cross-cutting, collaborative research projects. In fact, many ideas that were generated during the development of the O&M Research Roadmap could easily fit on other roadmaps, such as Policy and Planning, Environmental, and/or Design and Construction. IdeaHub provides an easy means for effective and continuous collaboration between practitioners that previously may not have interacted in the former, more one- dimensional problem statement development process. IdeaHub is a tool for stakeholders to view and develop research ideas from outside their own area of expertise, creating an impetus for collaboration. The hope is that this will result in research projects that span multiple disciplines – reinforced by the content of the research roadmap. 1.3 Roadmap Development Process The O&M Research Roadmap was developed over several months, and is based on two main sources of information: a review of existing and ongoing research (or literature review) and an extensive stakeholder outreach process. The literature review provided the research team with an understanding of the key issues in this field that have been examined to date. This provided a foundation for developing an initial set of high-level topics and example research ideas that were used as basis for discussion with industry stakeholders. The literature review process and results are described in Section 2. The stakeholder outreach process involved discussion in a variety of formats with numerous participants across the industry, in both large and small group settings. The stakeholder process and participants are described in Section 3. 1.4 Roadmap Products ACRP Project 11-02 Task 29 includes four products: the Narrative Report (this document); Visual Research Roadmap; Research Idea Database; and the Narrated PowerPoint presentation. 1.4.1 Visual Research Roadmap The Visual Research Roadmap is an interactive version located on ACRP’s website, with a static version included as Appendix B in this document. The Visual Roadmap is designed to convey a lot of information quickly to the user. It allows users to see the distribution of the research ideas over a five-year timeline, organized by high level theme and sub-topic, and to understand the relationships between the themes and topics. By hovering over each

3 research idea icon on the Visual Roadmap, users can read the research idea title, background information and objective. 1.4.2 Research Idea Database The Research Idea Database is a searchable Excel file containing all forty-two ideas generated during the project. The database can be filtered by a number of categories, including high-level theme, sub-topic, keyword, related research (existing or ongoing research), idea rank (based on overall prioritization score) and by related ACRP Idea Hub tag. The ACRP Idea Hub has approximately 30 topics identified as “tags” that practitioners can select when entering a research idea or problem statement into the portal. Tags include subjects such as sustainability, human resources, customer experience, airport planning, etc. The Idea Database includes relevant Idea Hub tags for each research idea to further demonstrate the multi-dimensional nature of the knowledge gaps. The Database is described in Appendix C. 1.4.3 Narrated PowerPoint Presentation The Narrated PowerPoint presentation provides readers with an overview of the project, the roadmap development process and instructions for how to read the Visual Research Roadmap.