Happy landings: keeping people moving in safety and comfort

17/02/2009

Buro Happold provides people-flow solutions at London City Airport

Free, uncongested flow within public buildings is both an issue of safety and security, and of comfort and visitor experience. Nowhere is this more apparent than in airports, where queues and increasing security restrictions lead to frustration, and where fast and effective evacuation can literally be a matter of life and death.

When disaster strikes, such as the fire which caused extensive damage and forced Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport to be evacuated in 2001, fast and safe exit planning is crucial. In an every day context, airport terminals and other public spaces can be designed internally to allow a maximum number of people to circulate and rest in comfort, without congestion-related queuing. Profit can also be maximised, by locating revenue centres in areas of maximum footfall; with the extensive shopping and dining areas available in airports, this brings a real and tangible benefit.

Buro Happold’s expertise in this field includes not only design and modelling, but real-time data capture, research on crowd safety design, computer analysis of behaviour under both routine and emergency situations, and safe disembarkation from various modes of transport, including aeroplanes. Passenger flow modelling helps everybody involved in the process to optimise the design, space layout and operational management of an airport; from architects, planners and developers to fire engineers, regulators and security advisers.  All analysis is fully integrated with other disciplines – Buro Happold’s passenger flow and safety modelling analysts work in tandem with the whole design team, through to the structural and building services engineers.

Optimising both operational and emergency strategies

“Ultimately, our goal is to optimise both normal operation and emergency evacuation management strategies,” explained Buro Happold’s Dr Shrikant Sharma; an engineer, numerical modeller and software developer who heads up the practice’s SMART team, which is dedicated to delivering innovative and operationally focused solutions to complex engineering problems.

“The key aspect of crowd flow study involves capturing, analysing and modelling user behaviour and movement patterns, and then mapping them onto the spatial layout of the new building, to optimise design and management strategies,” he said. “We enable the design team to identify potential problems in terms of space provision, and the effects on comfort, safety and management. By forecasting activity patterns and flow rates, we can optimise the provision of routes, entrances, exits and stairways to improve the ease of circulation – enhancing the performance of the building in the long term too.”

Buro Happold’s SMART team has developed proprietary software to model all aspects of passenger circulation – SmartNetwork is used for conceptual design and space analysis, and EventCounter enables sophisticated data capture. Meanwhile, SmartMove can model thousands of occupants circulating and evacuating a building, with inbuilt optimisation capability. This integrated approach helps solve problems involving complex passenger itineraries and multimodal transport links (air, rail, coach, car and pedestrian).

Upgrading London City Airport for 2030 – people flow modelling for terminal development
Buro Happold’s SMART team has been invited to assist London City Airport, which has developed a master plan for their growth and development between 2010 and 2030, in response to the Government’s aviation white paper on the future of air transport.

“We will be helping London City to optimise passenger flows within the reconfigured terminal and proposed expansion areas, which include new departures and arrivals zones,” said Sharma.

Buro Happold has been working closely with the operations and security teams at the airport to assess current demand and extrapolate it into the future. The team has obtained detailed quantitative assessments of transport-related parameters, such as modal splits and rail expansion plans; of design parameters such as the number of self service check-in and bag-drop stations; and other operational parameters including immigration, ground handling and security requirements.

From this, a micro-simulation of arrivals and departure scenarios, based on the anticipated growth rate in demand, has been created, leading to a network model with appropriate variable inputs, to allow sensitivity analysis on the various factors influencing terminal performance.

“It has been predicted that London City Airport will need to accommodate five million passengers a year by 2020, and eight million by 2030,” said Sharma.  “Our survey has focused on the critical scenarios for peak periods, which have then been extrapolated to cover future demand, informing the design requirements, expansion level and changes the airport will need to make to keep people moving safely and efficiently through the terminal. One key area highlighted in the simulations is the baggage hall – and in fact a new and improved baggage handling system has already been installed recently, which should lessen the queues for bags.”

Within the five million passenger scenario especially, Buro Happold’s model should allow for 97% of passengers to achieve ‘ideal’ waiting times at common use self-service check-in kiosks (CUSS stations), and 99% to achieve the ‘desired’ waiting times at bag drops.

Jeddah Airport’s Hajj terminal

Another airport scheme where SMART modelling was used is Jeddah’s King Abdul Aziz International Airport Hajj Terminal. In 2006 Buro Happold were engaged as technical advisors to one of the consortiums that were bidding for the Build, Operate, Transfer (BOT) concession for the Hajj Terminal.

Buro Happold carried out detailed simulations of the arrival and departure areas, looking at capacity, comfort and design, as well as at the management of all the facilities. Design, operations and 3-D visualisation teams worked together on the simulations, and the work went hand in hand with the design process, advising on and optimising the space and resource provisions within the terminal.

“The space had to be analysed in the context of existing IATA guidelines, and then we identified the key realistic scenarios for dynamic simulation,” said Sharma. “Only then could we test them against passenger waiting times and densities.”

He added - “From a technical perspective it was a tremendous success but unfortunately the full benefits of our work was not realised as the concession was awarded to one of the competitors."

Buro Happold has successfully applied its passenger/crowd flow management and modelling techniques to several high-profile projects, including the London 2012 Media Centre, Liverpool’s Kings Waterfront, the MMU Business School, the Thomas Deacon Academy, Glasgow Prestwick Airport, and Barcelona’s Rail Terminals.