Business Continuity and Operational Resilience in Airport Infrastructures: A Process-Based Approach

Abstract

Airport infrastructures represent complex sociotechnical systems where business continuity management must confront hybrid operational, climatic, organizational, and cyber risks. This study examines the capacity of these organizations to align normative compliance with actual operational resilience through a process-based approach focused on the passenger journey. Epistemologically, this research adopts an action-oriented constructivist framework. The methodology relies on a mixed exploratory design: first, a conceptual modeling of the passenger journey processes; second, an expert survey was conducted with a critical sample of 13 airport managers and executives operating at platforms with annual traffic volumes ranging from 66,000 to 14.93 million passengers. The findings, derived from the aggregation of secondary descriptive closed indicators and the thematic coding of open-ended questions, highlight a disconnect between the formal existence of continuity plans (100% agreement regarding process maps and general business continuity plans) and the perceived capacity for multi-actor coordination during disruptive events. Data analysis underscores the significant burden of multi-stakeholder governance constraints (85%) and technological dependencies lacking verified manual redundancy protocols (77%). This paper contributes to the literature by establishing a processual framework for business continuity management (BCM), operationalized through a contextualized RACI matrix.