The European aviation industry has set itself a mission to share more data between airports, airlines and ground handling agents in a bid to speed up its own operations and improve the passenger experience, and thereby attract greater numbers of paying customers.
But the advances being made with Airport Collaborative Decision Making (A-CDM) software, cloud or centrally hosted data sharing platforms, innovative mobile apps, locational targeting, data analytics and business intelligence platforms are far from uniform, with some airports moving more quickly than their rivals and other entities within the value chain remaining reluctant to relinquish control or ownership of passenger information.
This year’s Aviation IT conference, organised by EVA International and held in London in November, saw airport IT staff, baggage handling companies and hardware and software vendors come together to discuss the progress being made and the challenges still to be addressed.
Solutions on display included departure control systems (DCS), baggage management, flight information, telematics and passenger boarding systems from Damarel Systems and Zafire Aviation; a cloud-based modular flight information system from UFIS; a PDA-based aircraft turnaround software for dispatchers from Avtura; a kiosk-based check-in application, security reader and device management software from Objective Solutions; and a low-cost message routing system from Edifly. Air Dispatch and ServiceTec were also on hand to explain their managed IT services for airports and airlines.
A-CDM advances collaboration
A central pillar of the broader data sharing initiative is A-CDM, software designed to help airport operators, airlines, ground handling companies and air traffic control speed up aircraft turnaround times by enhancing the efficiency of the pre-departure sequencing process. This includes supporting more accurate target take-off times to improve en route and sector planning on the European Air Traffic Management (ATM) network via Departure Planning Information (DPI) messages sent to network operations.
Having implemented one of the world’s first A-CDM systems back in 2002, Munich International Airport is something of a pioneer for the technology, although up to 25 more airports have also now deployed all or some of the components required to deliver the pan-European A-CDM infrastructure.
“It is not about local decision-making … but making sure that everybody has the same picture of the data, and [knowing] what type of information has to be shared,” says Achim Tuffentsammer, head of application systems aviation at Munich Airport. “If they [other European airports] are connected to this type of system and information sharing, they can provide aircraft take-off times which can be calculated to lead to estimated landing times.”
Yet for all the advantages of using A-CDM, there remains resentment amongst some airport operators who feel that the technology provides greater benefits for airlines but result in greater costs for the airports that finance its implementation. This may be one reason why some gateways are finding it difficult to obtain funding for A-CDM implementation either at the executive level or from the various parties that make up their commercial ecosystems.
“We have already implemented [A-CDM on] inbound and turnaround, and we are currently debating the departure control element,” observes Aaron Bazler, information systems operations director at Manchester Airport Group (MAG), the authority responsible for UK four airports – Manchester, East Midlands, Bournemouth and Stansted. “It has been a challenge to get that focus from the various airport stakeholders, to get that buying process sorted. We spent a lot of time on the first bit of the process – the third bit is a work in progress. I can see it [return on investment] for the airline and ground handling, but it is about articulating that spend [for the airport] because we will actually end up paying for it, and that is something that no one has managed to do for me yet.”
“We [the airports] see the benefits [of A-CDM], the airlines see the benefits, everybody sees the benefits, but it is about who is going to pay. The Ontario Teacher’s Pension Fund that is the majority stakeholder at Copenhagen Airport does not want to release funds at the present moment in time for that particular purpose,” adds Steve Tarbuck, business development manager at Copenhagen Airport.
“Once the EU becomes a little bit stronger with the legislation, we will have to do it. And that is what we are going to do, wait until we are pushed, leave it until the last possible minute and then we will have to invest. In the meanwhile, we are doing incremental work, like the dynamic stand application, some of the small bits and hopefully at the end of the day the jigsaw will come together and there is the picture. And I think most smart airports are doing the same in order to maintain their cashflow.”
Data ownership issues still to be resolved
Despite the advances being made with A-CDM, with up to 50 European gateways expected to become ‘A-CDM airports’ by 2015 according to Tuffentsammer, there remain hurdles to data sharing and collaboration in other parts of the aviation sector. These frequently derive from the fact that many airports, airlines and ground handling companies compete with each other, and do not want to lose control of the information they have.
Martin Gallington, senior vice president of IT at Menzies Aviation, a global provider of passenger, ramp and cargo handling services, agrees that data sharing initiatives within the aviation industry remain fragmented, and that ongoing heavy competition creates barriers.
“More and more people want to keep the information for themselves, and that is against collaboration,” he argues. “It is not because nobody wants to do it [share data] it is about prioritisation. Airports [and airlines] have got 50 priorities and working with ground handlers on data collaboration is not the top one. There are no technical barriers, though there are a lot of legacy systems, which makes things complex.”
But Gallington also points out that where data sharing between airports, ground handling companies and air traffic control can be made to work, it has yielded significant positives, citing Menzies’ recent work with UK airports vis-à-vis ramp allocation.
“Because we got the information 15-20 minutes earlier than we were getting it before and because we know where the aircraft is going to be, we are able to communicate closed door times back to the airport in real time rather than wait for somebody from the operations centre to key it in because we are sharing the data on our systems,” he points out. “Previously, we had to interface with their system and input the data, so now air traffic control has five to ten minutes heads up in advance of when that aircraft is going to be ready to push back.”
A similar story emerges from London Heathrow’s Terminal 5, where Heathrow Airport enterprise architect Gurpinder Gill has spent the last five years working with Ultra Electronics to build a standardised web-based collaboration platform that pulls information from underlying airport and baggage handling systems and shares it with participating stakeholders, but which does not make it available to others unless problems are encountered.
“We tell everyone, every system on here handles privacy constraints, but the information that is passed on to us goes to everyone on that integration layer,” Gill informs. “The airline community of handlers get exactly what we get, for every one of those baggage factories there is a central airport store and they all get the same information. But the information is not passed on to users unless you get data privacy concerns.”
Cloud-based systems promote collaboration
If consensus on data sharing can be agreed, another way to approach the issue of getting so many legacy applications to swap information, or selected subsets or fields of information, is to implement a shared software platform that can overcome integration problems.
Amadeus’ Altéa suite is a community-based passenger service system which consists of cloud or centrally hosted reservation, inventory and departure control applications used by all the community members (with 51 implementations at last count, according to the developer) and – where it makes sense – provision of the application under a software-as-a-service model hosted in Amadeus’ own data centre.
“In the past, previous generations of IT managers thought it was better to have their own DCS, which is why so many systems were created. But we replaced that with business rules management so that the same lines of code can work differently, with different rules set for low-cost carriers and full service carriers,” remarks Yannick Beunardeau, commercial director for airport solutions at Amadeus.
Many airport IT managers doubt whether cloud-hosted systems offer sufficient security, performance and reliability guarantees to host mission critical systems and prefer to keep data and applications on-premise. However, Beurnardeau insists those attitudes are changing.
“Whether cloud or centrally hosted, you have more reliability because centralised systems are multiple, load balanced and can scale to take care of millions of transactions, whereas a local system can have a defect because of air conditioning faults or anything,” he notes.
Mobile location data harnessed for business intelligence
Beyond sharing information between airlines, baggage handling companies and air traffic control to improve operational efficiency, airports are also working hard to introduce more collaboration with retail outlets in order to establish new revenue streams from locational advertising and marketing promotions communicated to passengers via their mobile phones.
Gilles Brentini, IT innovation manager at Geneva Airport in Switzerland, is reluctant to label the strategy as a loyalty programme, but is exploring ways to use locational mobile data combined with information gleaned from social media to target passengers with products and services as they move through the airport, such as charging a small fee to fast-track them through security during peak hours.
Geneva Airport is working on a boarding pass tracking project with SITA focused on collecting passenger information in real time and then uploading it into a business intelligence (BI) system that combines it with A-CDM and other information, sharing the database with ground handling staff, bus transport providers and other entities to help streamline operations. The airport uses Cisco’s WiFi location technology to capture passengers’ whereabouts and match the information against their destination, flight time and likely boarding gate, and sends them offers based on how long they are likely to remain in the airport in proximity to specific retail locations within individual terminals.
“We want more money but we do not want to raise prices for airlines because we know they are having a tough time. But at the same time we want the passengers to be really satisfied; those are the challenges,” Brentini says. “Having an offer tailored to customers is nice, but to do that we need a CRM (customer relationship management) system that contains data on those customers and some kind of customer behaviour information, which is where WiFi, bluetooth or boarding pass tracking might be helpful.”
Sharing data between airport retail outlets via mobile phones can be problematic, primarily because different entities use different formats that are harder to ingest, especially where the information must be collected, assessed and turned into meaningful action quickly to be of any commercial use.
“If we want to notify customers of special offers, events in Geneva and so on, we need an app but it is a kind of hassle to get that information,” Brentini goes on. “We can ask the restaurants to plug into our intranet and feed data into our app, but the truth is they can’t because they just write a word document, and somebody needs to collect those and input them.”
Mobile applications for passengers
Tokyo’s Narita Airport is another gateway utilising a Cisco WiFi location server to track the movements of passengers through its terminals in a bid to improve the passenger experience. It is also examining the use of smart digital signage technology such as that available from Samsung and Panasonic, whereby real-time information pulled from passenger mobile devices can be quickly analysed and fed back on large, easily accessible public displays.
Working with external software developers and mobile network operator NTT.Com, the airport authority has been working since 2010 to produce a suite of innovative mobile applications solutions for customer smartphone and tablet computers dubbed the iAirport project. Narita is piloting a terminal navigation map that employs augmented reality technology to determine the subscriber’s location using a combination of WLAN signal and the smartphone camera to display information about specific locations caught in the camera’s lens. Another element of iAirport is a multilingual audio translation app which uses voice recognition and reverse translation – particularly useful when translating Japanese which has a different alphabet than English and other European languages – and which has to date been downloaded 280,000 times.
“We are currently in the process of developing a voice recognition system, called the Narito Concierge … [customers] just speak into the smartphone and it displays the most suitable answer,” explains Yuki Kubota of Narita Airport’s IT planning department. “Currently it is only available in Japanese, but if we can overcome all the technical issues we would like to make it usable for customers from all around the world in other languages and extend it from Android-only devices to [Apple] iPhone and iPad users too.”
Mobilising airport and baggage handling staff
Narita issued staff working at its information kiosks with tablet computers in June 2012, allowing them to relay information such as sudden schedule changes and lost property alerts in real time rather than having to visit counters where PCs were available or use paper-passed systems for the same purpose, thereby increasing the speed and accuracy with which they can pass information on to customers.
Shawn Richards, chief executive at passenger services platform company Ink Aviation, outlines the opportunity for a new approach to IT that the wider proliferation of mobile devices offers to the aviation industry. Traditional reliance on fixed desktop PCs using Microsoft Windows operating systems and locally attached printers, for example, taken together with the associated systems management platforms used to control those devices, may either no longer be required or can perhaps be effectively circumvented using mobile devices which share software and hardware wirelessly.
“Being able to print on shared hardware is no reason to spend millions on middleware. Mobile is the first opportunity the [aviation] industry has had to change that way of working and get rid of a large layer of cost out of the business,” Richards insists. “The app switcher, which is the home button on a tablet device, makes it very easy to sandbox applications and share things like printing which were previously driven by the COM ports. If you asked your own IT department if you could print to a COM port printer today, they would probably slap you in the face.”
Menzies’ Gallington agrees that the future is all about ‘mobile’ for staff as well as passengers, but airport IT departments are facing tough decisions over the type of devices and wireless connectivity to introduce.
“The idea that we have an operational room and that is where all the IT is does not work anymore. We have to get the IT out on the ramp and that is a challenge because it is not a very technology friendly environment,” he says. “You need some sort of verbal communications, electronic communications and scanning [capabilities]. You do not want everybody carrying three or four devices, so it is about how do you get a single device that you can afford.”
