The management of a modern airport is a challenging task that implies great efforts and capabilities to cope with current industry trends ranging from market deregulation to high competition levels. Considering the increasing cost of labour and the lack of trained personnel on the hand, and the need to increase revenues and improve the quality of service on the other hand, the airport managers require tools that help them to allocate the right number of skilled people at the right time and the right place.
Looking at airport operations there are mainly four stages in a complete life cycle :

Strategic : simulation and capacity plan validation. In this stage the airport before getting relevant choices regarding the acquisition of hew flights, new airlines or simply searching for new staff, is engaged in verifying the correct balance between resources available and the work generated by expected contracts.
Tactical : long term planning. Once resources have been consolidated, the best planning to apply to each staff in terms of shift to cover is generated for each airport department.
Preoperation : the Tactical plan could be partially invalidated by changes in the flight plans. To recover in the best way flight changes have to be evaluate and corrective action have to apply.
Daily Supervision & Control : during an operational day, activities planned for each staff must be checked to monitor flight status and capture as soon as possible emerging criticalities. Updates to daily planning could be done to adapt and comply with the changing scenario.

Regardless the specific stage, the process related to the resource planning is composed of a series of concatenated activities. Firstly, are generated the work tasks to be carried out for the flight activities scheduled in the reference period. The set of services represents the input allowing to evaluate the needs curve in terms of resources required for each time slice in the period.
The identified work load and available resources become the input of the planning functions having in charge the research of the optimal allocation. Automatic outputs can be manually updated to let the operator the power to manage unpredictable situations. Once in operation, human resources can be supported by wireless devices to know exactly the task in charge and interact with the system to notify the progress of services operated.
Planning needs increase as the number of staff increase. To properly manage staff to correctly satisfy service level agreements required by airlines and short turnaround processes let such tools becoming mandatory assets both for airport authorities and handling agents.
Such tools are also to be intended as means to manage staff in operations sending them the list of task to carry out and receiving the current progress state.
Matching the progress state versus next planned activities stakeholders can point out criticalities and make corrective actions.
At the time being, new requirements coming from ACDM, impose to handling agents to set a good TOBT at the right time. Of course the planning tool having in charge tasks and resources can easily suggest the more reliable TOBT avoiding penalties application by the ANSP.
Moreover, there is a new trend about the whole coordination of all airport activities. This means that all stakeholder will be tightly involved in airport processes monitoring such as the turnaround.
Airport authorities itself will be monitored to verify that security and other special direct engagements are perfectly in line with all airport tasks.
This means that a well conceived resource planning platform is becoming a mandatory asset of challenging airports.

Software Design Solutions

Software Design solutions, in the context of the allocation of airport resources, allow to automate both the long-range planning and the daily management gaining an efficient management of flights and aircrafts. Resources planning solutions for human and mobile equipments belongs to a family of planning solutions, named Resource Brain, able to plan any kind of airport resources typology. The whole planning and management set of solutions helps planning and management of all kind of human resources (handling operators, security, etc.) and mobile equipments (coaches, stairs, tankers, …) by providing tools for Staffing Needs, Shift Generation, Rostering, Shift changes and Resource allocation along four phases :

Strategic
Tactical
Preoperation
Daily Supervision & Control.

The whole solution is structured on the following applications:

Resource Brain- Human&Mobile Resources
ResourceTracer

The Daily supervision & Control of ResourceBrain-Human&Mobile can be delivered in two different versions:

Light : this version is able to automatically plan services . Staff and mobile devices allocations are let to manual operations.
Full : this version other than services planning is also equipped with an optimization engine for automatic staff and mobile devices allocation.