It is now common practice to conduct a value engineering exercise as an integral part of an airport terminal design. Such reviews consist of assembling an expert panel to conduct a critical review of a developing design to identify elements of the design contributing much to the cost but little to the value received by the traveling public. These elements can then be re-designed to increase their marginal utility or eliminated. The great challenge in conducting such an exercise successfully is to properly identify what constitutes value and to avoid downsizing or eliminating elements that will later be helpful or required. Maintenance operations subsequently may find these reductions suboptimal when seen from a total life cycle perspective.

The objective of this research is to develop tools and guides to help airports evaluate if value engineering is appropriate, and if so, how to implement its use, with a focus on terminal projects.