The Hindu Business Line : IT’s making airport operations smoother and faster

Lounge of the Bengalooru International Airport at Devanahalli, near Bangalore. IT and communications solutions from Siemens are integrated into the execution and functional operations of the Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore airports. — K. Murali Kumar

Shubhra Tandon

When time and efficiency become crucial for running mega projects such as airports profitably, information technology has to step in. According to Siemens, a global major in IT solutions, while 10 years back airports were spending only 2-3 per cent on IT infrastructure, today they spend around 8-12 per cent of the total investments, depending on which part of the world the project is.

Gone are the days when airport operators could depend on manual intelligence to carry out operations right from checking your ticket at the departure gate to transferring your luggage into the aircraft.

In an age when passenger traffic is increasing by leaps and bounds everyday, it becomes extremely important for airports to maintain efficiency in such processes as turnaround time for an aircraft, on-time departures and arrivals, and simple check-in procedures for passengers and baggage, resulting in overall business benefit.

If one looks at all these processes closely, they are all interlinked and together they make an airport work successfully. Bridging the gap between all these is Siemens Airports, a vertical and virtual organisation under Siemens AG that undertakes all IT solutions provided to airports. Incidentally, India has recently been made the global hub for the same by the company.

End-to-end solutions

Siemens has also set up an airport systems laboratory in its Bangalore office, where various airport-related products are being designed.

Targeting end-to-end solutions from the processes as well as technology point of view, the company is providing physical systems for passenger and baggage handling, cargo, security, surveillance systems and fire safety systems.

“Since we develop all these technologies in-house, we know a lot about these processes. And then, as a master systems integrator, we work towards getting the right combination of systems together and configure the right set of processes for the airport operator to realise maximum business benefit,” said Mr Ravi Shankar, Head of Aviation Systems, Siemens Information Systems. Currently, the company is working with all the major metro airport projects of Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore for IT and communication solutions.

In Bengalooru International Airport, Siemens is a part of the consortium of operators and has done the entire planning, execution and functional process of the airport comprising Airport Operational Database (AODB), Flight Information Management Systems, ground handling activities, location management and resource management for the airport.

From the end-customer point of view, the solutions include passenger check-in, baggage-handling and others. At the Hyderabad International Airport too the company has been responsible for undertaking all the above tasks.

On the passenger front, Siemens has also developed the technology for biometric check-in counters which can detect thumb impressions, eye-ball patterns or facial features before a passenger checks in.

Among other offerings is fully automated baggage handling system enabling the passenger to simply put the luggage on the belt while check-in and then the baggage automatically gets sorted out after necessary security checks and gets into the aircraft. Not just that, with its baggage reconciliation system, the chances of baggage getting into the aircraft without the passenger is nil!

With the contact centre, the passengers can contact the airports directly to know other available options in case one misses the flight or wants to check available flights without calling individual airlines separately. Self check-ins, common-use terminals, departure control, automated flight information and many other passenger convenience solutions is what the company is offering.

Integration

“In our portfolio more and more focus is on how we integrate different elements together. For instance, this contact centre needs to be integrated with AODB, which gets its data from flight information system, so it’s like a long chain,” said Mr Shankar.

Now, from reaching the airport to finishing security a passenger takes about 20-40 minutes, depending on the time of day. In the new airports of Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad, where Siemens has put in the technology, the time taken will be less than 15 minutes, he said.

On disembarkation from international flights, he said, “From landing to finishing the last protocol of passing customs would vary from 40 minutes to an hour-and-a-half currently, in the new airport, we can guarantee less than 40 minutes during peak time. What it also means is that by saving these 15-20 minutes, an international flight is ready for boarding 20 minutes earlier!” Which means, if an airport has 100 flights in a day, one can imagine with these time savings how many more flights it would be able to handle, he added.

In addition, clock systems synchronised with Greenwich Mean Time providing uniformity at airports in flight landing and take-off timings from any airport, digital radio for communication, integration of all the components of the IT portfolio at the airports, network telephony, etc., are some of the other offerings from an airport operations perspective. “With this portfolio we can build the entire IT and communications for any airport in the world,” he said.

The company’s offerings also vary depending on the capacity of the airport, which ranges from small to medium to large. Small airports would handle 2.5 million passengers, a medium airport between 2.5 million and 10 million, and a large airport would cater to about 50 million passengers.

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