The Power of Information
Airport Operational Database and its benefits for operational efficiency
Airports today appear often busier and more complex than a beehive.
Aircraft of all kinds and origins land and take off - sometimes at intervals of
less than a minute.
Thousands of passengers pass through the terminals - some within fractions of an
hour, and many of them just hopping from one plane to the other.
Aircraft on the ground require servicing ‑ that has to be assured within a very
short time-frame and in the correct order.
Bags are transported over miles of belts and rails and, day by day, tons of
cargo are moved through warehouses and across the apron.
As such, all this activity does not pose much of a problem: Processes can be
planned, capacities forecasted and resources allocated, and everybody involved
can be told what to do and exactly when.
But just how often does everything go exactly according to the pre-established
plan? Often yesterday’s plan is history after less than an hour into a today’s
operation: The plan may not be entirely useless but certainly in need of
revision!
Flights come in late, passengers arrive late for check-in, bags get lost (yes,
this still happens) or need to be off-loaded, and airlines unexpectedly replace
out-dated aircraft by new types.
In full operations, there is hardly any flight that is precisely handled
according to the previously drawn-up schedule! Improvisation and reaction to
changes is part of the very nature of commercial aviation, and airports need to
be extremely adaptive to all kinds of operational changes.
So it is tremendously important to have a common schedule of events for all
parties involved in the aviation ground process and to be able to modify this
plan immediately, taking into account all effects on all parts of the airport
community and communicating such adaptations to everybody concerned in real
time.
And by the way:
If everything is reorganized to react to a sudden change, appropriate and
real-time
passenger
information should not be forgotten in the midst of all the internal issues
that need to be organized.....
AODB ‑ for efficiency and flexibility
Planning operations, storing the information in one shared database and
making it available, together with any updates, to everybody concerned, is the
main task of an AODB.
An AODB stores an airport’s basic data, the
flight
schedules and the
resource
assignments from connected applications, manages access to the system
individually per user group profiles, and communicates any change actively, so
that the connected systems and people never miss an information update.
Our offer for this purpose is our
Universal
Flight Information System (UFIS)1. It includes a
CEDA
(Central Database), which not only provides the above-mentioned functions
but also includes effective database management tools and a plausibility check
to provide a safeguard against data input errors.
Its most important function is the immediate automatic update of information
acquired from the widest possible range of sources: It can be interfaced with
airline systems, SITA and AFTN networks, ATC systems and meteorological data
providers, as well as with all kinds of airport-internal systems such as FIDS,
BHS, BMS and Crisis Control Centers, gathering and distributing all data
reliably and accurately.
Intelligent
integration tools, such as the UFIS-internal or any external message
brokering (EAI) with third parties, handle the multitude of data inputs and
requests, queue and validate messages, and make sure that subscribing recipients
get their information in time – all the time.
Such database-centered systems integration is invaluable in designing and
implementing efficient airport management and operation processes across the
entire airport community, helping to maximize resource utilization, increase
service quality and reduce costs.
Our AODB offer can take the form of a turnkey project, including a
pre-installation analysis of requirements and an inclusive systems design phase
as the basis for the customization of the system itself.
Database content – specifically for the airport basic data such as geometry,
fixed and mobile resources, staff and user profiles – as well as the current
seasonal schedule is entered, and users are trained how to maintain the
database.
We also install the necessary hardware including all peripherals and make sure
that the desired optimum level of availability and performance is achieved
through carefully planned load balancing, cluster configuration, uninterruptible
power supply and even a remote disaster recovery system, if requested.
Integration via the system’s inbuilt broadcasting and message brokering
methodology plus the standard interfacing tool EXCO is designed, and interfaces
or adapters are developed on a customer-specific basis.
Regarding after-sales services, the customer has the choice of various service
levels of standard maintenance modules, with fast response through remote
dial-up technician access and even including a periodically performed “health
check” on the entire system.
