Digital Innovation at European Airports Assessment Answer

Airports Digital Innovation

The advancement in technology has been impactful in airport management for in both the airside and the landside. This has increased efficiency and accuracy in airport operations across the world. Both airport staff including pilots, security, booking and travelers have benefited from the efficiency in technology. There has been associated advantages such as reduced operation time, increased costs and improved flow of systems. These innovations have been effected in Amsterdam Airport, Heathrow Airport, London City Airport and Istanbul Airport with some of the technology being award-winning innovations. There are observable similarities and differences in these innovations as outlined below:

One of the main similarities between the digital innovations is the need to reduce human interaction which will in turn reduce the check-in processes. This is evident with Amsterdam’s Schiphol which is a modern AI system used to reduce human monitoring and provides self-serve kiosks and self-serve baggage drop. The airport also uses full-body scanners which eliminates the use of human manual body scanning. Self-service bag drops is also seen in Heathrow airport which also intends to introduce robots to replace human customer service agents (Serrano and Kazada, 2020). The use of computers in place of humans also increases safety in the airport and allows efficient data monitoring as evident in Istanbul Airport.

The digital innovations are also geared to ensure safety in air travel. Air travel can be risky especially given certain weather conditions and without proper air traffic control. Sappington et al., (2019) argues that most airports are faced with the challenge of reduced visibility due to fog. These reasons have caused the crashing of several planes in history killing millions of people. Airport technology has been advanced to reduce these effects as seen by Amsterdam airport’s Air Traffic Control (ATC) system which uses AI to monitor the rate of traffic flow and enhance efficient operation of tasks. Heathrow airport uses Interseasonal Heat Transfer (IHT) which is a de-icing system and eventually ensure safety in landing of planes. The London City airport is also known for using a remote digital air traffic control tower which use high-definition cameras and sensors.

The airports also have a common need to promote ease of operations for the travelers in the airports. Airports are known to be chaotic with thousands of travelers from all over the world trying to navigate the system and catch their flights on time. Amsterdam Airport ensures this by having ‘short connection units’ for the connecting passengers to reduce their wait period. Istanbul Airport also ensures this using their LoRaWAN technology which is communication technology that has been used to track people and luggage and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) according to Ghubaish et al., (2021). Heathrow Airport intends to introduce autonomous driving carts to help customers with their luggage and ease their travel experience.

One of the observable differences in the airport technology is Heathrow’s use of biometric systems. The airport uses face recognition for domestic flights to help verify the identity of the traveler without having to check the physical documents (Štimac et al., 2020). This has been said to reduce the check-in time and boarding process. The airport is also unique for its intended introduction of robots to act as customer service agents. This will help travelers with issues such as directions and locations and will eventually reduce the chaos and confusion which is often evident in the airport. The robot can also handle more complex issues that would have taken human intervention hours to handle.

The Istanbul Airport is also unique for using the LoRaWAN network system which will use sensors to track various mechanisms. This technology will be useful in asset management and maintenance. It will not only be able to track individuals and luggage but vehicles as well. This will ultimately digitize asset management and ensure predictive maintenance. It will also be efficient in automatically generating monitoring data in the airport. The airport will ultimately reduce travel times and optimize maintenance work planning which would be beneficial to both the airport staff and the travelers as well.

The London City airport is unique for their award-winning remote digital air traffic control tower. It uses optical sensors and displays which provides visual information. The information is the directed and controlled by air traffic controllers at a control center in Swanwick, Hampshire (Alison and told Reuters, 2021). The technology has been important in improving situational awareness for the traffic controllers which improves the security, operation and efficiency of air traffic services. The technology also uses object-tracking, geo-fencing and HD zoom technology. The tower has metal spikes to keep birds away from the cameras which are also self-cleaning to promote accuracy. This advanced technology has benefited the airport operations and increased efficiency.

Recommendations

One of the main concerns with advanced technology is the lack of proper cyber security applied on the technology. The airport technology innovations do not mention any advanced technology along ensuring cyber security and preventing data breach. This has been a concern for most individuals and organizations since when personalized data falls in the wrong hands, it has potential harm to the individual and organization at large. Airport systems store sensitive customer data such as an individual’s address, social security, banking details etc. This can ultimately lead to identity theft if the data is leaked. This situation gets even more dangerous with biometrics such as face recognition and fingerprint scanning as to be adopted by Heathrow Airport. The technology innovators should research on enhancing cyber security measures as much as they research on improving the existing technological innovations. According to Suciu et al., (2019), in airport informational security, there is a lot to consider including digitalized processes and all human activities. Improving the cyber security will reduce the risk of data leakage and increase confidence of the travelers to trust the airport with their bio information.

Technological innovations are important since they are an improvement on human weaknesses and consequently lead to increased accuracy, improved efficiency and speed. While these advantages have led to the improvement on various fields including airport management, there is an increasing concern for airport staff who are at a risk of losing their jobs. One of the observed similarities in technological innovations is reducing human interaction such as during security check-in, luggage handling, and customer services. Airports are known to offer employment to thousands of staff across the world. It would be a good recommendation to the airport management to create avenues where the airport staff would not lose their jobs despite the implementation of high-end technology. They can be trained and positioned on how to operate the technology. The staff assist the travelers to be able to handle the technology which might be complex to some of the travelers. As a result, the airport staff will keep their jobs while the airport operations improve due to the technology.

References

Alison, L. C. C., & told Reuters, H. K. London City becomes first major airport to be fully remote-controlled. https://pure.rug.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/40230331/H_nkeM_ller2016_The_Global_Making_of_Policing_title_ToC_Ch1.pdf

Ghubaish, A., Salman, T., & Jain, R. (2021). Book Chapter Experiments with a LoRaWAN-Based Remote ID System for Locating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). https://web.archive.org/web/20210716134451id_/https://videleaf.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Experiments-with-a-LoRaWAN-Based-Remote-ID-System-for-Locating-Unmanned-Aerial-Vehicles-UAVs.pdf

Sappington, R. N., Acosta, G. A., Hassanalian, M., Lee, K., & Morelli, R. (2019). Drone stations in airports for runway and airplane inspection using image processing techniques. In AIAA Aviation 2019 Forum (p. 3316). https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/6.2019-3316

Serrano, F., & Kazda, A. (2020). The future of airports post COVID-19. Journal of Air Transport Management , 89 , 101900. https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0969699720304841?token=7D7375732A54E2FA78871C7AC43DD5900537C3A816E944A355F635532FD679A71E932E03768B63C9A91A606D1521D331&originRegion=eu-west-1&originCreation=20230426081104

Štimac, I., Bračić, M., Pivac, J., & Oleksa, I. (2020). Analysis of recommended measures in the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic at Croatian airports. Transportation Research Procedia , 51 , 141-151. https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S2352146520308693?token=92E76B6436FE92786FF75FB338EA414E889CC20D51782D3AA390E99E8F4D212F691B0FF3E56CC9185D88E7818E5E6C5A&originRegion=eu-west-1&originCreation=20230426081209

Suciu, G., Scheianu, A., Petre, I., Chiva, L., & Bosoc, C. S. (2019). Cybersecurity threats analysis for airports. In New Knowledge in Information Systems and Technologies: Volume 2 (pp. 252-262). Springer International Publishing. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-16184-2_25

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