October 22, 2024: Next month, an autumnal Amsterdam will welcome thousands of airport professionals.
Airport executives, operational teams, stakeholders and regulators will gather in the fitting setting of the Steigenberger Airport Hotel, just a short sprint from Schiphol runway. The event? The International Airport Summit 2024.
Resilience and sustainability strategies will be shared, along with practical ideas for embedding new technologies into airport operations. The intention is to pool learning around how to drive operational efficiencies and passenger satisfaction as high as possible.
One core source of improvement is data – turned into intelligent information. And it is this that my colleagues, David Elliott and Hakan Engman will be leading a ‘fireside chat’ on at the summit.
They will be discussing how to master the massive amount of data that an airport collects and needs to manage. They will be explaining the role and benefits of connected data environments to create highly valuable information. They will also be talking about the role of digital twins in ensuring that infrastructure assets perform as required to support operational airport performance, both currently but also in modelling future improvement scenarios.
Picking up the pace
The summit is one of a series of airports events taking place during H2 2024 as the industry enjoys a surge in demand and searches for ways to best meet the challenges it faces post-pandemic.
After those most turbulent of four years the pace of recovery is strong – London Heathrow, for example, surpassed 1.8 million passengers for three consecutive weeks this summer.
But the return to normal service has brought with it its own challenges – recruitment for example. It has also brought into focus once more the traditional challenges faced by airports, globally: Strengthening their operational resilience, delivering the highest-quality passenger experience, driving efficiencies, investing in asset enhancements and capital projects and reducing carbon emissions.
Leadership in LA
Discussions around these key areas were the focal point of another recent sector event – the Airport Leadership Forum in Los Angeles. I was privileged to be included in this two day, invite-only workshop. Airports executives from across the Americas engaged in valuable panel discussions to share their experiences, learn about best practices and see how technology solutions are being applied at airports around the world to create the improvements that all airports need and want.
With my colleague, Rick Wagner, we presented to the group, which was hosted by the Cities Today Institute, on the key factors related to airport performance. These included the role of effective data management, and how digital twins help airport leaders to visualize airport infrastructure performance and optimise their decision-making.
With frank discussions, these events will be of significant value to airport leaders throughout the industry. We are looking forward to leg 2 which will be held in London later this month, bringing together key European airports leaders.
”We presented to the group – which was hosted by the Cities Today Institute - on the role of effective data management and digital twins in ensuring that airport infrastructure performs at its best..."
Seeing the benefits of digital at Sydney Airport
The practical benefits of a data-driven approach to airport asset management are brought to life in examples such as Sydney Airport (which David and Hakan will be referencing in their fireside chat at the IAS).
When it approached us Sydney had one big challenge – its data. Scattered across different business units and stored in varied databases and systems, finding relevant plans and documents was a daily obstacle for the airport teams. To meet corporate and regulatory requirements, the airport’s design team had to update documents monthly, with their time being consumed with generating dozens of complex maps and facility drawings.
The airport’s spatial services team, comprised of architects, civil engineers, airfield designers and others had come up with a plan – to create a cloud-based ‘self service’ portal where any user could access relevant information quickly and easily. It also needed to handle future integrations.
The team selected Bentley’s iTwin Experience to enable them to integrate financial and asset data and metadata, models and documents from multiple systems and to help create a reliable, overall picture of the airport infrastructure.
By collating the data and making it readily available, the ‘Maps@Syd’ initiative is helping Sydney to increase efficiencies and improve productivity. In 2022, around 200 users were using the system. Kim Cohen, the project team leader, said that if these users accessed the platform just once a day that would save 5,280 hours a year.
The airport, one of the world’s oldest, is now on course to become one of its most advanced in its approach to asset management and maintenance, through its ultimate vision of creating a live digital simulation of its entire 906 hectares site. You can hear Kim Cohen talk about the airport’s digital journey and the benefits being unlocked in a short video, here.
Cohesive: Helping airports chart their digital course
As with any technology, to provide benefit to an organisation a digital twin needs to be applied to achieve a specific business objective.
The benefits of visualized, digital information are clear, but the creation of a twin of the business can seem difficult or even impossible.
Many of our clients have the same question: How do I start a digital twin project, and how do I know that it will benefit the organization?
The first steps should be these:
- Select a critical business area for which you have identified a specific improvement.
- Define what that improvement should be, and how its success criteria will be measured.
- Create a proof of concept around that area with a specific scope.
- Review the data required to support the success criteria. Concentrate on data sourcing and relationships to turn the data into information that you can use to decide how to make the improvements that you want to make.
Following this process, the project becomes achievable and tangible. The benefits from that PoC will justify further investment for the next business area, and so on.
Our team is passionate about helping airports teams to unlock the sorts of benefits being enjoyed at Sydney, whatever your current digital maturity and at all stage of the asset lifecycle.
Details of David Elliott’s ‘fireside chat’ at the International Airport Summit, can be found, here.
If you are interested in learning more, our airports experts are also hosting two webinars:
30th October: Advancing Airport Projects and Operation – Digital Integration
3rd December: Bentley Webinar: Advancing Airport Projects and Operation – Digital Integration
This blog post was written by Greg Hoile, our Transportation Industry Lead, Americas. Greg is a highly regarded digital enterprise asset management solution architect, implementer and project director with 30 years of professional experience.
He combines his practical experience, gained through working for major operators such as London Underground, with an in-depth knowledge of industry challenges and goals, and of how organizations can use technology to meet those challenges, achieve those goals and realise high levels of value.
