To reduce ORAT risks, improve transparency and meet project goals, airport owners and their general contractors have begun to rethink the commissioning team’s composition and role. The criteria for commissioning complex airport projects now include:
Early Project Involvement
When engaged early — before schematic design begins — commissioning professionals with experience in IT, security and airport-specific systems can offer insights that place projects on a sound path. Their input on project specifications can help preempt integration issues down the road. Even airports with robust IT staffs will benefit from early commissioning guidance on difficult challenges, such as managing the points where multiple systems integrate.
Some commissioning professionals — because of their deep airport IT experience — now serve in a dual role as IT manager or liaison. While designers and contractors operate largely in silos, commissioning professionals/IT managers focus on the big picture, providing much-needed continuity over a project’s life cycle. Their understanding of a project’s history and objectives can inform their understanding of the downstream impacts of any changes.
Project transparency and accountability are also enhanced when commissioning milestones and granular details, such as asset-level activities, are added to a project’s overall schedule. Omitted from many construction schedules, these details provide owners with a contractual lever they can use to hold contractors and vendors accountable for their work. By linking asset commissioning activities to a master schedule, the commissioning provider can also advocate for appropriate commissioning periods, instead of simply responding to end-of-project scheduling demands for resources, equipment, and system and area turnovers.
Commissioning Document Management System
Port authorities, city governments and other agencies responsible for airport operation share a common trait: They value transparency. They want clear and reliable ways to stay abreast of commissioning status on a given day, week or month. They need to be alerted to activation delays and budget overruns, their causes, and the plans for their resolution. They want proof that they are getting what they paid for.
A robust commissioning document management system can address these needs and more. Essential to the commissioning of complex airport projects, web-based platforms like Facility Grid facilitate the development and management of commissioning checklists, test procedures, issue logs and other documentation needed to track equipment and system status. Commissioning teams configure these systems to alert contractors to pre-functional checklists and other documentation they must complete on the equipment or systems they are responsible for delivering. Issue logs advise owners and other responsible parties of problems and their resolution.
Document management platforms also improve commissioning efficiency, making it possible for commissioning professionals to manage work remotely until all documents are submitted and final on-site testing greenlighted. They also provide the transparency needed by all parties preparing for the transition of building occupancy and operations.
Airport IT, Security and Special Systems Knowledge
Commissioning professionals need more than traditional mechanical, electrical and plumbing capabilities to test and verify the complex systems found in today’s airports. Consider flight information displays, for example. Experience with multilayered integration is often needed to commission these systems, which may incorporate visual paging and sophisticated wireless technologies that provide audio messaging through hand-held devices in emergency situations.
Cameras, access control, card readers and other security system components pose testing and integration complexity that require understanding of existing security system operations and TSA requirements. Other integration challenges arise in passenger boarding areas, where automation technologies create opportunities for common use gates that must accommodate the needs of multiple airlines and aircraft sizes. Similarly, increased focus on digitalization has created the need for greater IT proficiency when connecting new gates, security systems and terminal facilities to central utility plants and facilities management systems.
Growth in Work Groups
Airport construction projects involve many stakeholders. Rather than inviting dozens of participants to large status meetings, commissioning professionals for today’s complex projects aim for smaller, focused work groups that address specific challenges instead. For example, a centralized security forum — involving the general contractor, equipment vendors and operation and maintenance providers — can help fill gaps that emerge when new devices are integrated into an airport’s existing security system. An FAA work group can focus on the aviation regulations that must be met in the integration process.
Work groups like these can break down the walls of otherwise siloed operations and provide a forum where communication stays current. Such work groups include only the team needed to address the issue at hand.