An accelerated-time simulation of departing passengers’ flow in airport terminals

The authors have developed a package that can simulate in detail passengers’ traffic within the departures terminal of Málaga airport. This is one of the main Spanish airports, with an average traffic of more than 20,000 passengers/day, and a high ratio of charter flights with European destinations outside Spain. The package performs a passenger-by-passenger “accelerated-time simulation” that considers at each step details like the class, flight and destination of each passenger. Once the simulation has been performed, it can show, plot or give details about any queue in the terminal at any minute. Moreover, given a list of flights, it can also produce an enlarged list of flights with the same spectrum (models of planes, schedules, destinations, …). It has been implemented in the Computer Algebra System Maple 8.