With the growth of the aviation industry, aircraft designers are pressured for the development of sustainable solutions able to deal with the increase in traffic as well as congested airports. Turnaround time becomes an increasingly important factor contributing to the overall success of an aircraft design. A shorter turnaround time may allow airlines greater utilization of their fleet, particularly those that operate primarily short/medium haul flights. This would allow for a decrease in operational costs and, by accommodating more traffic, an increase in revenues. Furthermore, airlines able to operate with shorter turnaround times are more attractive for airports, allowing them to increase throughput and combat airport congestion. This, in turn, may allow airlines to negotiate better airport fees, decreasing their direct operation costs. With the powerful impact that the uncontrollable fuel price has on airlines' costs, maximizing revenues and minimizing other operational costs is crucial for airline's survival. Researchers and manufacturers are looking into novel aircraft designs for integrated solutions: aircraft capable of providing a more efficient form of flying, while also tackling the aforementioned problems related traffic growth, airport congestion and airline costs. Appropriate tools and methods are necessary to be able to quantify the effects of design choices over the complete aircraft performance; which must also include on ground operations, measured with turnaround time. Furthermore, these tools and methods must be applicable to unconventional designs and suitable to early design phases, such that novel configurations can also be analysed. This paper presents procedures and tools to assess the turnaround performance of an aircraft at a conceptual design level. Literature shows that boarding is always on the critical path of aircraft turnaround; therefore, for simplicity reasons, on ground operational performance is condensed to boarding performance. Based on previous work performed by the Flight Performance research group at TU Delft, an automatic fuselage and cabin model generator is developed. Furthermore, using NetLogo, an agent-based boarding simulation tool is developed to estimate the boarding time associated to a given cabin design. Both tools are validated, then coupled to facilitate and automate fuselage design studies focused on boarding performance. Parametric studies are run to determine the effect of fuselage design choices on boarding performance. Focus is placed on features that are considered strong determinants of boarding performance, such as doors (number, location and width), aisles (number and width) and overhead stowage compartments (capacity and occupancy). Aisle width results show that overtaking is only possible in aisles wider than 65cm and that, due to the non-linear distribution of aisle blockage dimensions, there are cases in which increasing aisle width does not provide any boarding benefits (between 85cm and 90cm for instance). A strong sensitivity of boarding performance to hand luggage stowage compartments capacity and occupancy is observed. Multidisciplinary effects, such as structural weight penalties and aerodynamic drag penalties, induced by the fuselage design choices are assessed qualitatively. With the exception of structural effects of doors (number, size and location), that are estimated using an empirical method developed by Torenbeek. The tools are applied to two use cases: a Prandtl plane configuration from the project PARSIFAL and a flying wing configuration called Flying V. The Prandtl plane is designed with a non-circular fuselage cross section, implements a 70cm-wide twin aisle cabin configuration, with up to three doors used for boarding. This allows it to carry 308 passengers (comparable to a standard twin aisle aircraft such as the A330-200) within a 44m fuselage (comparable to a standard single aisle aircraft such as the B737-800). From the point of view of boarding, it is shown to perform better than both a conventional twin aisle with equal capacity and a conventional single aisle aircraft of equal length. To avoid structural weight penalties caused by the non-circular fuselage, an alternative circular fuselage design is examined. Door features (i.e. 1.6m wide doors that allow two simultaneous entry queues) are used to compensate for the narrower (48cm) twin aisle configuration. Boarding performance is comparable to the original Prandtl plane. Moreover, a circular fuselage allows for larger overhead stowage compartments, which further improves the boarding performance of the circular Prandtl plane. Also the Flying V, thanks to its double twin-aisle configuration, performs 27-30% better than its conventional counterpart (the Airbus A350). The tools developed are shown to be sufficiently flexible and thus enable boarding studies on novel aircraft configurations at a conceptual level, where early evaluation of their performance is necessary to derisk their development process. Further development of the tools is recommended for future research projects, to increase their applicability to unconventional configurations (such as a blended wing-body, or a multi deck fuselage) and to extend to other activities in the turnaround process besides boarding (such as de-boarding). Finally, it is suggested that some of the features of the boarding tool, such as the determination of stowing time, be studied in more detail, because they have a strong effect on boarding time, yet their validation is sub-optimal due to the shortage of empirical data describing the phenomena.