Sofia Kalakou

Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal

November 08, 2013, 14:15, Room GC B3 424 (click here for the map)

From passenger route choice models to airport flexibility

In spite of the transport mode, all the travellers are primarily pedestrians. Transport terminals are considered as infrastructure planned for pedestrians and capable of employing tools that will let them respond with flexibility and efficiency to future challenges. It is suggested that pedestrian flows should have an active role in the definition of the flexibility of a transport building configuration and that pedestrian behavior should be integrated in this process at an early stage. This talk aims to present some preliminary thoughts on the structure of passenger route choice models for an airport building and the way that they can be used in airport flexibility analysis. Travel time, wayfinding, space characteristics and available free time are important for passenger route choices and pillar sources for the specification of passenger route choice models. This combination allows us to explore any latent relationships between space characteristics, route choices and flows of passengers, to model more efficiently pedestrian route choices and to designate the properties of efficient terminal configurations. In terms of planning policy and flexibility, it gives some indications for the value of each area as derived from the way the passengers perceive it and the value they add to it. In this way route preferences can be incorporated in flexibility analysis as inputs that have the potential to indicate areas that are often preferred.

Bio

Sofia is a third year PhD student of the MIT-Portugal program in Lisbon (Instituto Superior Tecnico -IST). Her research project deals with flexibility of airport passenger buildings. She holds a Diploma in Civil Engineering from National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)and an MSc from IST in Complex Transport Infrastructure Systems. In her thesis projects she evaluated the performance of Greek airports with Data Envelopment Analysis (NTUA) and she developed a pedestrian model to simulate passenger movements in Lisbon Portela airport and evaluate the airport processes (IST). Her research interests focus on transport terminal planning and management, non-motorized transportation, behavior and activity models and operations research.