Client: Liverpool John Lennon Airport
Type of works: supply of MFlow Forecast system

Liverpool John Lennon Airport (LJLA) approached HRS to support their £12.4 million investment programme to migrate the entire passenger screening operation to a new purpose built facility. HRS’ responsibility was to help them understand how the new facilities equipment and processes would cope with increased passenger throughput and safeguard against potential changes resulting from increased threat levels and customer service expectations.

Following exponential growth in passenger numbers, increasingly process intensive regulations, the imperative of improving public perception and increasing commercial performance HRS had to ensure that LJLA’s new facility could cope and perform under pressure. To respond to this challenge the HRS solution MFlow Forecast was deployed. MFlow Forecast is a process simulation system which recreates accurate models representing the behaviour of real life systems and subjecting them to predictive experimentation.

In cooperation with Software Partner Lanner Group the key input metrics surrounding the processes and sub processes of a passenger’s journey through departures were collated enabling LJLA to estimate from time intervals, resources and constraints the resulting screening throughput times and retail spend statistics.

MFlow Forecast is valuable not only because it can ensure airports can invest and plan efficiently to achieve optimum security, customer satisfaction and commercial revenue but that months worth of testing is achieved in a matter of minutes, further minute moments in an individual passengers journey are fully revealed in the consequences they have over a day’s performance which traditional testing would struggle to identify.

Since delivering MFlow Forecast to LJLA, HRS further developed this powerful decision making tool, providing access over the internet for other airports, anywhere around the world. As long as an airport knows some basic information about their operation, MFlow Forecast can allow planning teams with access to the MFlow Forecast website, to feed information based on actual flight and passenger data as directed by the carefully tailored question sheet to manage passenger processing resources. Within a few minutes the Airport is presented with a full simulation of events such as passenger queue times and lengths based on the data provided and the time period chosen. This represents a significant leap forward in airport planning tools, providing powerful information at the touch of a button in a low cost, user friendly format that requires no operator training.

Steve Gill Environment and Facilities Director for the Peel Airports group said “These are exciting times, working closely with HRS’ aviation experts we now have a tailor-made simulation tool that can model hundreds of potential events involving passengers within our airport, taking into account our staff resource, known constraints and the way we currently interact. This gives us significant advantages over real life experimentation in terms of cost, time and repeatability, and the tool even includes the randomness and variability we all see in real life, despite painstaking planning.”