Madrid airport: a new integration design for a new operational model

Integrating the airport business, along with its inherent operational processes is a complicated matter, requiring careful design and planning. The main difficulties arise from understanding and describing the airport's process management model in detail, including its operational methods and essential information flows. Integration not only affects communications between systems, but also includes the specification of data that systems need to share and the integration of business processes with other external organizations. The whole process can be best accomplished by the physical and logical integration of the airport's real-time management via a centralized Airport Management Centre (AMC). The main benefit gained from integration is an airport that functions much like a single system, enabling processes to operate more efficiently. This gives a natural return on initial capital investments, thanks to economies of scale attributed to the more efficient use of capital resources with proportionally less labour input requirements, coupled with significant productivity increases, which translate directly into reductions in operational and maintenance costs.