Be it snow, volcanic ash or strikes, crisis events impose high costs on the air transport system and society. Airlines have progressively learned to mitigate the irregular operations arising from such events through procedures such as Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) for traffic flow and airport departure management; however the passenger's door-to-door journey during difficult times often remains unpleasant. Meta-CDM (Multimodal, Efficient Transportation in Airports and Collaborative Decision Making), aims at taking a passenger-centric approach when examining how airside and landside CDM can be interlinked with other transport modes to minimize the impact of severe disruptions. In this paper, we provide a preliminary analysis of past successes and failures of passenger-centric operations, by documenting the state of the art in airport CDM, by investigating representative disruptive events and by studying the conditions of development of airport intermodality. In addition, as the success or failure of any new concept depends on which metrics it is being evaluated against, we also discuss the need of relevant KPIs to measure the success of an extended CDM concept.
