A novel Integrated Risk Management Method for Airport operations

Abstract

Airport operators need to use several domain-specific risk management systems to comply with regulations and protect their business interests. These risk management systems are simple and focused but handicapped by their deterministic view of hazards and risks. They cannot understand a hazard’s behaviour in a complex, socio-technical system such as airports. They also suffer from probative blindness during their risk assessment and accord prominence to high severity and high-frequency risks and tend to neglect low frequency but high severity risks known as “Black Swans” as improbable. Moreover, they view risks from the regulators’ perspectives rather than from the airport operators and often discount their business continuity risks. To overcome these limitations, this work proposed an integrated risk management method that can help an airport operator to manage complex risks at the organisation’s level. It uses subject matter experts’ brainstorming to identify compound hazards and associated risks. It prioritises risks based on the existing mitigations and their effectiveness. The results section demonstrates this method’s usefulness by applying it to day-to-day scenarios in an airport. In conclusion, this proposed method can help an airport operator to identify complex risks and manage them in an effective manner. This is a simple to use, cost-effective, and user-friendly method. Airport operators can implement it to manage risks with a holistic view with no significant changes to their existing organisational structure. Since this method has a generalized process, any organisation can use it apart from airports. This method’s usefulness depends on qualified subject matter experts’ availability. A field trial with an airport can help this method to gain acceptability with the operators and regulators.