Background

The Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) provides practical solutions to the challenges faced by airport industry practitioners. Every research project starts as a problem statement (research idea). ACRP relies on volunteers from the industry to develop, evaluate, and recommend problem statements to its Oversight Committee (AOC), which then selects those to be funded as research projects.

In 2015, the AOC adopted a strategic plan for ACRP to help ensure that the program continues to be responsive to the industry’s needs. The first strategic issue identified in the plan is to “ensure that problem statements are of the highest quality and greatest relevance to the airport industry.” More specifically, this strategic issue is supported by an objective of developing “new initiatives for generating research problem statements relevant to the airport industry.” It is also the AOC’s desire to reduce the time between the development of a problem statement and the availability of research results. These new initiatives should therefore result in a more efficient and effective process.

Objective

This research will assess the strengths and weaknesses of the current ACRP problem statement process, including the processes for developing, evaluating, recommending, and selecting problem statements for ACRP projects.

STATUS: Research is underway.