Challenge
Imagine scooping up piles of children’s building blocks and throwing them into a wooden box. You find that although all the blocks came out of the box, they do not seem to fit. Now imagine placing the blocks carefully in the box to minimise wasted space and discovering that all the blocks fit easily.
This is the problem that airports face. They are like a fixed capacity box. The passengers and planes, despite schedules, do not always arrive and leave in an orderly manner. The plans to operate the airport need to allow contingency for this variability. This significantly reduces the capacity of an airport and increases its costs.
Airport staff on the ground and in the control rooms are constantly reacting to events. They are opening and closing check-ins and security lanes. They are allocating flights to gates and managing the flow of passengers and baggage through the airport.
The goal was to provide airport staff with information to run the airport more efficiently. A cloud based architecture that integrated more than 40 internal and external data sources was developed. It delivered real time AI driven throughput optimisation.
Route to Value
Over a 2 year period, a transformation programme delivered improved operational capacity, business resilience, better customer and staff experiences.
Outcome
The business value delivered was:
- Queuing times reduced by ~20%.
- Annual misconnect savings of ~£20mn.
- Reduced staff overtime ~£3mn per year.
- 3% increase in passenger satisfaction.
- Improved resilience to climate events.
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