Modelling and simulation of passenger flow distribution at terminal of Catania airport

The percentage of the passengers linked to airport activities often reflects not only the level of economic and touristic aspects of a city but also the development of the transport system. The airport area thus becomes a node in the transport system characterized by a high percentage of users, mostly passengers. Numerous studies state that incorporating the behaviour of groups of individuals, especially interactions with fellow travellers and people working within the same transit area, can significantly affect the performance and use of services in the terminals airport. The benefits and the criticalities induced by the movement of a large number of people within confined areas are linked to the definition of impacts that can be seen in terms of time spent in each processing unit, preference of discretionary activity and level of service (LOS) in the processing areas. On the basis of the airport passenger flow model that includes group dynamics, a case study was carried out regarding the movement of users inside the departures area of Fontanarossa-Catania airport. The evaluation of the social forces acting has been carried out through the definition of nodes and arcs with the aid of dedicated software. Some parameters are investigated in order to characterize the iterations between individuals or groups of individuals characterized by common parameters. Among these parameters both closeness and betweenness are particularly important, ie those parameters that show how much they measure the proximity of the various individuals that can limit the movement and the correlation between them The simulation of transit flows and iterations between passengers can be useful to investigate different scenarios inside a terminal such as the maintenance of certain areas that could limit the transit or even simulate evacuation scenarios in emergencies. For designers and airport operators, the model also provides a convenient way to investigate the effectiveness of the design space and services allocations, which can help improve the experience of passengers in Airports. In this sense, the presented work turns out to be fundamental for the definition of the areas and the flows and therefore can provide useful details for the subsequent implementation through micro-simulation tools of the pedestrian outflow.