2D Queue Simulation

When working on airport simulations, it’s tempting to jump straight into a slick, polished 3D environment. But if you want quick, clear insights into your processes, simplifying your visuals and throwing that third dimension out the window for a moment can be a huge help. By reducing reality to a flat 2D plane, you can instantly spot where bottlenecks arise under different variables. Take a classic example at any airport: the queue.

For this latest airport simulation, I stepped away from those brilliant game engines and instead built an interactive web app in React. The application represents a generic process that passengers go through around an aircraft — think border control, security, or check-in. After you hit play, you see passengers happily moving through the process in real time… assuming the variables are in their favor.

In the sidebar you can configure things like the number of open counters, how quickly passengers appear, how long each check takes, and how fast they walk. You’ll also find controls to adjust the simulation speed or pause it. It all works beautifully.

Then you hit play and let the magic happen. Each dot flows through the process, and the graphs and tiles update their metrics in real time. It’s great to watch. And since video says more than a thousand words, here’s a short screencast showing the whole thing in action:

And because a working demo speaks even louder than a thousand videos, I've made the app publicly available so you can try it out for yourself:

Try the Passenger Queue Simulation here

It’s fully responsive, so you can even play around with it on your phone while you’re on the go. Enjoy.

To wrap up: this has been another valuable learning experience for me. Even though React isn’t nearly as flexible or powerful as a dedicated game engine for simulation work, the fact that you can build something like this and instantly share it through a web app opens a lot of doors for rapid prototyping in any organization. The sky’s the limit — actually, not even that… come to think of it, you can easily apply this on any place where people are queing up: supermarkets, shops, theme parks, public transport, you name it. Please reach out to me if you ever have an idea to test, I'm happy to help out!

Cheers, Rein