Linear Programming-Based Design and Techno-Economic Analysis of an Airport Landside Electromobility Hub

Airport landside transport electrification demands charging infrastructure capable of serving heterogeneous vehicle fleets within shared spatial and grid constraints. This paper presents an approach to coordinated design and techno-economic analysis of an airport electromobility hub (e-hub), which integrates charging management of city-connection electric buses (EB) and customer parking electric vehicles (EV). The EV fleet charging approach includes three coupled components: a heuristic rule-based instantaneous charging approach as an operational baseline, a linear programming (LP)-based coordinated charging approach, and a discounted cash-flow analysis framework linking operational outputs to long-term financial performance. All components enforce priority charging of EBs as a hard constraint, and account for grid capacity limits, photovoltaic (PV) generation, and optional, local battery energy storage. The approach is applied to Zagreb Airport using recorded parking data, evaluating 540 infrastructure configurations across varying charger counts, fast and slow charger shares, grid capacities, PV-equipped parking spaces, and battery energy storage system (BESS) capacities. The results show that the LP approach reduces weekly electricity costs by up to 8% and increases renewable energy utilization by up to 22% relative to the instantaneous charging baseline, primarily by shifting charging demand toward low-tariff periods and periods of high solar generation. A techno-economic analysis over a 15-year horizon shows that optimal infrastructure sizing depends strongly on the revenue model. Fixed idle-fee pricing achieves the highest NPV and cumulative lifetime profit, while congestion-aware pricing provides higher late-horizon annual profits at the cost of greater operational sensitivity.