Collaborative Research Network for Enhancing Airport Resilience Science and Operation

About This Grant

The objective of this research project is to establish and operate a research network for enhancing airport resilience. It brings together experts from academia, industry, and government to develop a novel framework for analyzing airport resilience to natural hazards and operational disruptions. The network aims to quantify the resilience of airport operations, synthesize best practices for recovery, and explore the integration of emerging technologies to simulate and optimize airport responses to external shocks. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the network intends to addresses complex resilience challenges in the aviation sector, enabling data-driven decision-making processes, anticipating evolving threats, thereby advancing both the science and practice of infrastructure resilience. Airports are highly complex systems with the primary function of maintaining flight schedules while ensuring safety, sustainability, and economic viability. The research network looks to produce conceptual models informed by resilience science to help airport managers identify critical functions across interconnected sub-systems, quantify the impacts of disruptions, evaluate resilience against both known and emerging threats, and optimize resource allocation for performance improvements. This goal intends to be achieved through three key objectives: 1) evaluating how resilience indicators translate into airport operational impacts and vary across different types of disruption; 2) identifying challenges related to data access, management, privacy, security, and interoperability while exploring pathways to improve data integration; and 3) proposing new paradigms for infrastructure resilience research by applying resilience science concepts to airport operations. Using Dallas Fort Worth International Airport as testbed, the project seeks to address significant gaps in resilience measurement and evaluation and generate robust and generalizable knowledge for transportation systems. Most importantly, it looks to forge a self-sustaining, collaborative platform for expert engineers, scientists, and practitioners to share insights that will improve airport resilience strategies, inform broader efforts in standardizing aviation resilience metrics, and set the foundation for long-term competitiveness of US transportation sector. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.