Briefing Paper - a Smart Airport

Introduction

If the purpose of an airport is to embark and disembark passengers, luggage and freight. Then the border, within this context becomes a demarcation line within the environment, made up of a set of rules, governed by processes and controls, that manage / restrict access across the boundary.

Digitalizing the Process

Traditionally, an Airport is a combination of processes from check in, to Customs, bag handling, biometric identification, data recording, and loading flights, all governed by standards and laws or “the way we have always done it”.

In isolation to digitalize any of these is not difficult and has meant generally digitalizing the human function or making the current process smarter.

This has included:

·         Putting a kiosk in place for check in – therefore digitizing the agent behind the desk;

·         Automating the immigrations process with biometric scanners;

·         Tracking individuals’ temperatures with infra-red scanners for health monitoring;

·         And tracking luggage / freight via bar codes.

 A Digital Reflection

Rather than look at the processes in isolation, an alternative view would be to look at the airport holistically, a complete eco system. Tracking the movement of people / freight from entry into the concourse, to the plane flying into the air.

If we think of the physical area of the Airport (including the border) is a constant, and the passengers/staff, luggage and freight are variables.

Therefore, functions within an airport could be connected to a virtual world, defined by a reference architecture, with a Smart Edge network tracking the variable factors.

This “Digital Reflection” becomes the control, adapting to changes in the physical environment below, with input from external systems.

(note -This solution goes well beyond the concept of a Digital Twin, where the physical environment remains in control, and a reflection is put in place for planning and efficiency, to the “Digital Reflection” becoming the control mechanism.)

 Technically: -

Through an external interface, the “processes” / external applications are run through this reflection, where changes to the physical world, when required, are made through a smart network.

The reflection is the Master, and the physical world a Slave.

With reference to the diagram below: -

·         The Cloud becomes a reference, where processes are run via external connections to applications (the constant)

·         The Edge acts as a transactional medium, making decisions and referring to the “Cloud” when required; (the variables)

·         A constant narrative occurs, with a 2-way conversation between the physical and digital worlds, using smart edge over a Private LTE / 5G network to provide transport

 Due to its nature – the edge of the network also becomes the termination point for a multitude of networks, including Fibre, Lorawan, Zigbee, Bluetooth or NFC. Combining these with a mobile network support by sims / soft sims, items moving around the network can be tracked on a variety of levels.

Business Use Case

If every attribute of the ecosystem is managed / monitored, with the goal of following people / luggage / freight and what they do: -

·         from tracking bags via Bar Code,

·         Biometric Scanning at the Boarder,

·         Bluetooth / NFC monitoring of hand luggage,

·         3D scanning of people. facial recognition,

·         People tracking / freight tracking and many more applicable uses.

The key differentiation of this model over other solutions will be the management of variable items over a constant reflection.

Going well beyond a single use case, having the ability for processes to bridge across multiple use cases / requirements (where, every asset, person or “Item” can be managed, with a network that provides a constant IP bearer, and an edge that can make smart decisions).

With transport being an important part of this solution, there is an added benefit of the airport supporting a private LTE Network.

Using Small Cells (rather than the Traditional Distributed Antenna system (DAS))[1] , the end to end solution

·         The Edge is smart, where compute is in place to manage the variations in reference architecture and processes to adapt this digital reflection;

·         The Cloud is distributed, allowing for redundancy;

·         And a flexible Wide Area Network that can support other micro services.

[1] For our model we have used Dense air, and LTE, where the network is licensed, the network is secure, standards based, and supporting QOS, IP management and seamless handovers.