Developing an airport resilience assessment model for climate change

Abstract

Climate change is affecting the stability of all types of transportation systems, including air transport. Ensuring the disaster preparedness capability of an airport has become a crucial issue. Prior studies on assessing airport resilience and risk analysis have failed to consider the impact of the disaster at various stages and the interdependence between the factors or criteria. This study proposes airport resilience model that considers the various stages of disaster response. First, we collect criteria affecting airport resilience through literature review and experts' survey to develop a novel evaluation framework. Second, this study applies the modified DEMATEL (Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) which was modified by introducing the concept of heterogeneous impact analysis and combined with the concept of centrality weighting. Then, the modified DEMATEL is further combined with the Dombi Weighted Aggregator method to explore the interdependence relationships among the criteria and effectively integrate expert opinions. Finally, modified VIKOR (VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje) analysis is applied to assess the resilience performance of Taiwan's major international airports and provide suggestions for improvement. The results indicate that pre-disaster preparation, with a weight of 0.338 among four stages, is the most crucial stage for enhancing airport resilience. This can be achieved through the implementation of effective emergency response procedures and evacuation plans in the event of a disaster. Additionally, this study suggests various improvement strategies based on the assessment results to enhance disaster resistance and resilience.