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4 1 Introduction 1.1 Project Description The Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) is a research program of the Transportation Research Board (TRB), which is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS). Now over a decade old, the ACRP is an âindustry-driven applied research program that develops near term, practical solutions to problems faced by airport operators.â1 The FAA sponsors ACRP. 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 practitioners. The ACRP relies on input and cooperation from industry practitioners, such as airports, FAA representatives, air carriers, trade associations, consultants, academic researchers, and state and local government officials, to develop research problem statements and serve on project panels to direct the research. Over the past 12 years, ACRP has published (and/or is in the process of developing) over 400 research reports, synthesis reports, legal digests, and web-based tools based on the interests and input of industry practitioners. The ACRP has undertaken the development of research roadmaps in its ten major research areas. The primary aim of these roadmaps is to âidentify gaps in knowledge and practice, uncover key opportunities and challenges, and outline and prioritize specific research ideas needed to address these gaps.â A core component of a Research Roadmap is the development and production of research ideas to populate ACRPâs IdeaHub (the online collaboration platform that allows people to team in creating problem statements for funding consideration by ACRP). The objective of this project was to develop a five-year Airport Environmental Research Roadmap (ACRP Project number 11-02 Task 32). As part of the approach, the research team worked with industry practitioners and the Project Panel to develop over 50 research ideas during the project. The ideas were prioritized using a set of criteria described in Section 4.2 of this report. To facilitate this process, the research team conducted a review of how other institutions prioritize research needs, including ACRPâs own process for prioritizing submitted problem statements, which informed the set of criteria selected for the roadmap. These criteria were applied to determine the relative priority of the ideas compared to one another and are listed below and described in detail in Section 4: 1) Avoidance of Duplicative Efforts 2) Applicability 3) Timeliness 4) Understandable and Implementable During the stakeholder outreach process, the research team solicited information from the industry regarding research gaps and major environmental priorities at airports. The research team expanded the original six high-level themes of Noise, Water Quality and Availability, Air Quality and Emissions, Natural 1 Transportation Research Board website, accessed March 10, 2018. http://www.trb.org/ACRP/ACRP.aspx
5 Resources, Sustainability, and Resiliency to eight, adding Emerging Technology and Monitoring and Reporting to round out the high-level themes for the Research Roadmap. An overview of the roadmap development process is described in Section 1. Section 2 provides a summary of the Literature Review, sources identified and a high-level summary of findings and preliminary knowledge gaps. Section 3 provides the research topics identified through the literature review as well as the stakeholder engagement. Research prioritization criteria are summarized in Section 4 and a list of stakeholders consulted throughout the process is included in Section 5. The deliverables for the âAirport Environmental Research Roadmapâ consists of the following products: 1) The Narrative Research Roadmap Report (this document) 2) The Research Idea Database (Attachment A â Excel database) 3) The Visual Research Roadmap (Attachment B and located online at http://www.trb.org/ACRP/ACRP.aspx 1.2 Project Background The airport industry has always faced a variety of challenges, problems and opportunities in the field of airport environmental management (for the purposes of this report, airport environmental also includes sustainability and resiliency). Current trends in the development of renewable energy resources, sustainable aviation biofuels, and zero emissions and waste initiatives, as well as new technologies provide new opportunities for airports to improve their environmental performance beyond what was possible in the past. Some challenges, like noise annoyance and air pollutant emissions, have persisted over time, while others are more recent challenges, such as accommodating electric vehicles. In order to maintain a steady supply of high-quality research ideas to address these opportunities and challenges, ACRP has undertaken the development of strategic research roadmaps in its identified topic areas. This project â ACRP Project 11-02/Task 32, âAirport Environmental Research Roadmapâ â is part of ACRPâs strategic effort to improve the development of research problem statements. The outcome of this project is a five-year prioritized Research Roadmap that identifies gaps in knowledge and research ideas in the area of airport environmental management. The Airport Environmental Research Roadmap enables industry practitioners to develop problem statements and assist the AOC in selecting projects for funding. The Research Roadmap is designed for broad distribution on the web, and via ACRPâs online platform for the collaborative development of research statements, the IdeaHub. The Visual Research Roadmap is built in Tableau® as this software allows for easy export to the web in order to embed the Research Roadmap on ACRP websites. The Airport Environmental Research Roadmap considers the main environmental challenges relevant to airport practitioners today, as well as challenges expected to emerge over the next several years. It categorizes the ideas into several high-level themes, and relevant subcategories in alignment with IdeaHub tags. IdeaHub has approximately 30 topics identified as âtagsâ 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., and allow users to more easily search for relevant and related ideas across multiple research fields.
6 The list of high-level themes is as follows: The intent is for the individual research ideas to serve as starting points for development into complete problem statements. The roadmap provides the reader with an understanding of the main topics of interest in this field and key knowledge gaps. 1.3 Roadmap Development The roadmap was developed through an extensive review of the current body of research, and input from industry practitioners. First, a thorough review of existing and planned research in this topic area was completed to understand what information is currently (or soon to be) available, and where knowledge gaps exist. ACRP and other TRB cooperative research programs have conducted a large number of studies over the past several years. The research team reviewed those studies that were published within the past five to six years and relevant to this field, but considered older content as well. In addition, the FAA has a significant body of research relevant to airport environmental issues. The research team has also taken advantage of other governmental organizations, trade associations, and sources that are considered ânon- traditionalâ in airport research, including organizations like the International Facility Management Association (IFMA) and the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure (ISI). The literature review process and results are described in Section 2. Second, input from industry practitioners was gathered to capture the current and emerging environmental challenges for airports of all sizes. During the development of the roadmap, a diverse set of airport practitioners, consultants, service providers, airlines, academic and industry researchers, and government officials were interviewed and surveyed 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 stakeholder process is described in Section 5. The primary audience for this Research Roadmap includes airport industry practitioners, ACRP leadership and staff, the AOC, airlines, consultants, and regulators. The expected outcome of this project is that the roadmap will be used by industry to develop problem statements for impactful research projects over the next five years and into the future. 1.4 Relationship to ACRPâs IdeaHub The need for a consistent supply of high-quality research ideas fueled the development of ACRPâs Research Roadmap projects and provided the foundation ACRPâs IdeaHub. IdeaHub is ACRPâs online platform for problem statement development, which allows users to effectively collaborate on ideas, vote Sustainability Resiliency Noise Monitoring and Reporting Water Quality and Availability Natural Resources Air Quality and Emissions Emerging Technologies
7 on preferred research topics, and follow the process from start to finish in a transparent manner (IdeaHub can be accessed here: https://ideahub.trb.org/). Both IdeaHub and the various Research Roadmaps share the common goal of identifying current and emerging challenges in the airport industry and converting these challenges into problem statements to guide future research funding. A key observation that members of the research team made during the development of other ACRP Research Roadmaps is that many emerging challenges span multiple areas of an airportâs business and operational areas. This resulted in the development of multidimensional research ideas that apply to multiple lines of business within an airport. Many ideas generated during the development of the Airport Operations and Maintenance and Design and Construction Research Roadmaps have a nexus to topics on the Airport Environmental Research Roadmap, as well as on other roadmaps, such as Policy and Planning, and Human Resources. These ideas would therefore benefit from the perspectives of a diverse set of industry practitioners for development into full problem statements. As an online platform for the collaborative development of problem statements, IdeaHub can enable cross-discipline review of ideas. ACRP staff can also consider proactively encouraging cross-discipline problem statement development through communication with IdeaHub users directly and indirectly through the industry associations. The goal is for the online platform and the parallel development of the Research Roadmaps to result in research projects that span multiple disciplines. 1.5 Roadmap Products ACRP Project 11-02 Task 32 includes three final products: the Narrative Report (this document), the Research Idea Database, and the Visual Research Roadmap. The Research Idea Database is a searchable Excel file, included as Attachment A, and contains all ideas generated during the project. The database is searchable and sortable by a number of categories, which include high-level theme, IdeaHub Tag(s), related research (existing or ongoing research), and idea rank. The static version of the Visual Research Roadmap is included as Attachment B to this report and the interactive version is available via Tableau Public.2 The Visual Roadmap allows users to see the distribution of the research ideas over a five-year timeline, organized by high-level theme and IdeaHub tags, and to understand the relationships between the themes and topics. By hovering over each research idea icon on the Visual Roadmap, users can read the research idea title, background information and objective. The placement of research ideas on the timeline indicates the relative priority of ideas to one another, and does not suggest that ideas should be research in specific years. 2 The link for the interactive roadmap is as follows: https://public.tableau.com/views/ACRPResearchRoadmapAirportEnvironmental/ACRPAirportEnvironmentalResearchRoadmap.