Automated Knowledge Engineering for Total Airport Management Systems

Research Problem

Airport operations are governed by extensive documentation describing procedures, responsibilities, operational rules, dependencies, and interactions between multiple stakeholders.

Much of this knowledge exists in unstructured manuals, technical documents, and fragmented operational sources. Differences in terminology and the distributed ownership of information make it difficult to transform these documents into consistent process representations that can support Total Airport Management (TAM), simulation, and optimization.

Automated methods are therefore needed to convert unstructured operational knowledge into traceable, machine-readable process models.

Contributions

Our research combines knowledge engineering and Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the extraction and structuring of airport operational knowledge.

Key contributions include:

• A dual-stage framework combining symbolic Knowledge Engineering and generative LLMs
• Expert-curated structures that guide LLM extraction toward operationally meaningful concepts and relationships
• Automated extraction of knowledge triples, process dependencies, actors, activities, and operational relationships
• Provenance mechanisms that anchor extracted information to its original source for traceability and verification
• Automated synthesis of structured airport process maps and operational workflows
• Integration of structured process knowledge with downstream optimization, simulation, and digital-twin applications

Selected Publications

• Semi-Automated Knowledge Engineering and Process Mapping for Total Airport Management
  Teo, D., Sam, A., Koh, C. S. M., Nagi, R., & Ribeiro, N. A. (2026). Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION 2026), IEEE.

Research Funding

• National Research Foundation Singapore
  Total Environment for Next-Gen Airport Management Experimentation Platform (TEN-X)
  Overall Project Award: SGD 6,920,853
  SUTD Work Package: SGD 1,158,307

Research Collaboration

This research is being developed within TEN-X together with A*STAR and airport stakeholders, with the objective of building structured operational knowledge that can support future Total Airport Management capabilities.