Today’s era is all about turnkey convenience. Be it retail, wholesale, manufacturing, healthcare, hospitality or good-old fashioned communication, technology has facilitated convenience and connections across domains. In high-paced sectors like aviation, the potential use of technology assortments to meet growing passenger volumes, address dynamic regulatory environments, monitor maintenance and infrastructure expansion endeavours, regulate safety protocols, and increase revenue, are extraordinary.
Since the transition of air travel from being a luxury to a modern-day necessity, passengers have thronged airports in the thousands, where they demand for everything from punctuality, comfort, entertainment, information and safety. As air travel flourishes, airports need to become more receptive to changing aviation dynamics. They need to introduce digitally aware systems that are interconnected, intelligent and at the same time easily accessible by everyone. In other words, airports need to become technologically multi-nodal.
This is where the concept of Smart Airports comes into the big picture. In simpler words, Smart Airports infuse the power information, ease of operation, and intelligence for strategic decision making into the airport ecosystem, thereby improving operational efficiency, increasing performance, and ultimately, the bottom line.
Elements of a Smart Airport
Some important parameters to consider when making an airport ‘smart’ are predicting demand, providing enhanced passenger travel experience, improving operational efficiency, organizing parking system, managing waste, improving staff productivity and ensuring security and safety. On the hind side, today’s airports, while being technologically advanced, are implementing isolated solutions to achieve their ‘Smart Airport’ vision; when in actuality the need of the hour is to design and implement a unified system, so that both the vision and benefits of ‘smart airport can be reaped.
To further this already accepted concept, we at Amnex have brought forth an assortment of ready-to-use platforms for airports to become informed and intelligent. But before we discuss the technologies, let us first understand the key enablers of a smart airport.
Well, they can be anything ranging from smart gates, beacon technology, mobile devices to navigate through airports, face recognition systems, all the way to air traffic management, baggage tracking, IP-based security monitoring, communications, ticketing, information systems, freight operations information systems, air traffic management, etc. These aspects make up for the entire Airport Value Chain and yield tremendous amount of data on a daily basis. But owing to governance by separate platforms, the data yielded provides independent information, which ultimately leads to a very unilateral decision-making process.
That’s why, we have inculcated a strong sense of intelligence and inter-connectedness in our technological solutions. Understanding the need for solid data as the precursor to strategies, we have enabled seamless data gathering and interpretation, so decision makers can see an accurate map of the present to determine a progressive future for airports.
Amnex’s Smart Airport Assortments to Enhance Passenger Experience
Passengers of modern era demand nothing short of turnkey information. To enhance this experience, we are using Digital IoT beacons to enable location-specific messages. This allows passengers to get accurate information on check-in counters, wait times, arrival and departure schedules, etc. including personal notifications on their connected devices. By using RFID baggage tracking, we’re helping passengers get up-to-date information on the whereabouts of their luggage and also notifications on collection. Through intelligent parking systems, we are giving passengers accurate information like live occupancy, parking availability, automated digital route guidance to vacant areas (included mobile-based guidance) and pre-booking of parking spaces. These portals also facilitate digital (including online) payments. Combined with comprehensive surveillance and detailed, turnkey analytics, we’re also empowering airport authorities to make decisions based on real-time scenarios.
Enabling Services Beyond Airport Gates
Today’s passenger relies on hand-held devices for streamlining their daily routines. By factoring in this paramount convenience, we’ve translated a plethora of services like route guidance to boarding gates, amenity locator system to find food joints, lounges, toilets, flight arrival, departure/delays, and real time tracking of baggage, on to a mobile app. To keep passengers engaged beyond airports, we have also enabled smart features like convenient search of nearby places.
Empowering Authorities with Actionable Intelligence
Building on the main concern areas of any airport – their revenue stream, we are opening doors to a whole new range of advertisements, through digital display boards, push notifications of offers and deals through mobile apps, advertisements integrated with information kiosks and more, to put passengers, advertisers and airport authorities, on a mutually beneficial technology platform. We are also enabling analysis of weekly and monthly revenue trends so that key performance indicators can be identified, and the most effective and profitable decisions can be made.
Addressing the complexities of Airports’ mammoth operations is perhaps the biggest challenge. To streamline such operations, we’re offering solutions like solid waste management using smart bins that detect and alert about garbage volume to airport’s cleaning crew. Using biometric scanning, surveillance systems and video analytics (with facial recognition), we are strengthening safety & security. We’ve measured the importance of asset management at every level of airports and provided GIS enabled platforms to track and monitor assets, buses and equipment, all in real-time. In terms of personnel management, we are empowering airport authorities with dynamic tools to manage employee & ground crew and track their movement in real-time.
Perhaps the most crucial part of airport operations that we are streamlining is its massive usage of energy and utilities. Through cutting edge systems, we can help airports monitor and control the entire energy value chain including electricity, water and gas. From leakage, fault and anomaly detection to environmental control, our solutions optimize efficiency and plummet costs significantly, thereby improving the bottom line.
As technology is getting smarter, operations are getting smoother, swifter and more intuitive. Airports are departing from isolated information systems and adopting a more comprehensive and inclusive technological approach. This is ultimately leading to acquisition of strategic data of facilities, property, assets, security, and real-time tracking, all of which are ultimately the ‘actionable intelligence’ tha airport administrators need to make informed decisions.
