A Novel Concept for Airport Terminal
Design Integrating Flexibility

Sarah N. Shuchi
B Arch (Hons), M.Sc (Environment and Energy Studies)
in [partial] fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Faculty of Creative Industries Queensland University of Technology

Airport terminals go through frequent transformations to accommodate technological advancements as well as changes in regulations. The ever growing aviation industry requires airport terminals to be planned, designed and constructed in a way that should allow flexible operating conditions.

The significance of “flexible design” has been identified by various researchers and architects, and a number of flexible design techniques have been applied to residential and some other utility buildings such as hospitals and educational building. However, the flexible design concept has attracted limited attention for application in airport terminals, which may benefit from this design approach to address the ever changing functional requirements.

The current research by Sarah N. Shuchi proposes a design framework to develop flexible layouts of departure areas in an international airport. A flexible design framework for airport terminals (FlexDFA) has been developed based on a number of hypotheses extracted from literature.

Business Process Models (BPMs) available for airport terminals were used as a tool in the current research to uncover the relationships existing between spatial layout and corresponding passenger activities, explicitly highlighting the significance passenger activities. The proposed technique uses a novel concept of obtaining rational adjacency information from BPMs.

An algorithm has been developed as part of the current research demonstrating the applicability of the proposed design concept by obtaining spatial layout for preliminary design based on passenger activity.

The generated relative spatial allocation assists architects in achieving suitable alternative layouts that are required to meet the changing needs of an airport terminal. A set of design parameters has been finally proposed to identify for choosing a suitable layout that will provide due flexibility in uncertain situations.