Enhancing the toolkit of airport operations analysts: Evidence from an airport baggage handling system improvement project

We discuss our experience from helping an airport operator and their team of airport operations analysts to introduce discrete-event simulation alongside their existing system improvement/development toolkit. Our project looked at improving the existing baggage handling system of a major European airport run by our partner organization. This paper is divided into two separate but related discussions. First, we collate recent reflections from this project together with those from similar airport projects we have been involved in for the past decade. We discuss a few observations that we believe should help to convince airport operators to develop more in-house skills around both analytical and simulation modeling and analysis, with a focus on the latter. Secondly, we describe one of the simulation components of our baggage handling project and demonstrate the effectiveness of various possibilities to improve the availability and reliability of these systems when operating under tight capacity constraints.