Building resilience - Securing the critical role of airports for the future

Warning signs

In April 2023, more than two feet of rain fell in just a few hours in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Flash flooding caused major disruption to homes, businesses and infrastructure. All flights to and from the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport were suspended, and its operations were effectively shut down for 24 hours.

Passengers were stranded at the airport, and on planes, with luggage and cargo movements at a standstill. The knock-on effects disrupted travel plans and supply chains for days after.

While the consequences of this particular event were limited to inconvenience and loss of revenue, it acts as a very real reminder of power of extreme weather events to expose vulnerabilities and paralyse airport operations.

The importance of airports

Airports have critical role as logistical hubs that keep urban centres and entire regions running. When disaster hits, they are a lifeline for vital supplies such a food and medical equipment, as well as means for evacuation.

Increasingly, airports are also becoming energy hubs. Many are now producing their own energy, with pioneering centres like Miami recently launching a half-acre floating solar farm in the neighbouring Blue Lagoon, and Louisville using 648 geothermal wells to access natural energy from deep below the airport site.

As airports move towards energy independence, they also have the potential to deliver power to the region in the event of an outage. In order to maintain the increasingly pivotal role they play in the region, for day-to-day life, and especially at times of emergency, airports need to be functional and accessible, whatever happens.

The flooding at Fort Lauderdale exposed the fact that for many airports, this isn’t the case. Across the sector, there is very little resilience in the face of extreme weather events, and as the effects of climate change gain momentum, the potential fallout is amplified.

The aviation sector needs to step up its game to address its vulnerabilities and catch up with climate change. Sufficient resilience must be built, so that airports can continue to act as effective logistics and supplies hubs and perform when disaster hits.

Proactive planning for the future

Developed by AtkinsRéalis, City Simulator is the first solution of its kind, supporting proactive planning to build resilience in a changing world. Using simulation and digital twin technology, City Simulator takes publicly available data on a range of key metrics such as population, movements and infrastructure, and combines it with time-specific climate predictions to generate realistic future scenarios.

A screenshot from AtkinsRéalis' City Sim digital solution showing projected rainfall in the Tampa area of Florida

By doing this, it can effectively evolve a city (and its airport) into the future, mimicking natural, manmade and tech systems – and their interactions and interdependencies – to simulate the impact of extreme events such as flooding, storms, wildfires, pandemics or cyber attacks.

The first run of the simulation involves a detailed visualisation, showing the flow of people and planes and how infrastructure is used. It demonstrates implications for every aspect of operations, including how high winds might affect fuel use, how hot tarmac might affect punctuality, or how floods might affect movement around the airport and the region.

This first run flags up risks and indexes their criticality to disruption, and during subsequent simulations stress-test various possible interventions, such as hardening sea walls or elevating roads. Capable of running 10,000 possible scenarios, the software quantifies and evaluates the effectiveness of possible solutions, as well as the resulting resilience.

Combined with an enterprise asset management systems like AtkinsRéalis’ VUEWorks, this kind of detailed simulation can revolutionise resilience planning by streamlining system data to prioritise interventions and capital investment, and adjust the cadence or vigour around the management and maintenance of critical assets.

A pathway to resilience

Climate change models have been on the radar for years now, but cities and airports haven’t fully understood how it will impact them. There are many risks that simply haven’t been considered, and that’s a huge problem for tight operations such as airports, where time is money and every second counts.

City Simulator helps build a clear understanding of what might happen in the future if we don’t act, and create future scenarios based around effective interventions, to create a pathway to resilience.

Strategic planning and budget allocation are the next steps in creating that pathway to resilience, and with a wave of masterplanning taking place as we address failing and end-of-life assets across the sector, now is the time to get resilience firmly on the agenda.

As an emerging field, policies are not developed and funding and investment is not necessarily forthcoming. The data from City Simulator has the potential to turn this around by providing transparency and accountability to facilitate defensible, data-driven decisions and encourage confident investment.

The effects of climate change are becoming more apparent every day, and they’re only going to intensify. It’s really important that the sector works together to consider risks and proactively address vulnerabilities head on, so we can bolster airports to withstand the predicted effects of climate change and remain efficient in an uncertain future.