A conceptual design framework to incorporate flexibility in airport terminals

Airport terminals go through frequent transformations to accommodate technological advancements as well as changes in regulations. The ever-growing aviation industry requires airport terminals to be planned, designed and constructed in a way that will allow flexible operating conditions. The current paper revisits the significance of the ‘flexible design’ concept, which has been applied considerably in residential and commercial buildings, but not in airport terminals. This paper proposes a hypothetical design framework, Flexible Design Framework for Airport Terminals (FlexDFA) utilising available flexible design strategies; it is envisaged that this strategy will assist designers in developing flexible spatial layouts at the early stage of a design process. The development of flexible layout exploits the passenger process models to uncover the implicit relationship between the spatial layout of a terminal building and its corresponding passenger activities. The proposed concept also identifies a number of design parameters to qualitatively evaluate the essential flexibility of a terminal design.