Real-time data delivers a smarter airport and world-class customer experience

Challenge

Melbourne Airport has taken a proactive approach to delivering a smarter airport and world-class customer experience; establishing an Enhanced Airport Coordination Centre (EACC) with whole-of-airport coverage, modelled around the customer journey.

Melbourne Airport is Victoria’s gateway to the world. It operates 24/7 and is the second busiest airport in Australia; with the Melbourne-Sydney air route, the fourth most travelled passenger air route in the world. Currently, Melbourne Airport welcomes more than 34 million passengers per year, with this number expected to soar to around 64 Million by 2033.

The Airport looked to Nukon to integrate siloed systems and combine data from multiple IT and OT sources to provide an intuitive, real-time representation of the current operational situation, using modern technologies and standards. This included the ability to represent, trend, predict and resource accurately and automatically in real-time.

Nukon was engaged to apply Melbourne Airport’s vision, understand their business needs and connect various organisational entities with the EACC to roadmap and implement their digital journey. Using an agile project delivery model, off-the-shelf software and project accelerators, Nukon developed a solution to deliver a step change in situational awareness capability.

Solution

The core deliverable theme for the system was Awareness, in real time. The challenge was achieving this in a silo based heterogenic system landscape where each element of information is sitting in a different silo. The Airport needed to combine all events from different systems into an intuitive and friendly user interface to enhance the awareness of the operation.

After a 12 week build time, Phase 1 of the digital road map was delivered, The Situation Awareness Platform, which ties together distributed systems in order to provide real-time representation of the current situation at Melbourne Airport.

It gives operators, planners, managers and external providers real-time information to aid communication, resource planning and identification of incidents which affect the customer journey and quality of service of the Airport.

The situational awareness tool can provide correlated data in a single web-based, real-time dashboard for operational status, data mining and what-if questions for data science. Back end integration software adds enterprise-grade interfacing capability to almost any IT or OT system, including automation controllers and telemetry systems.

Outcome

• Live visual representation of the airport, customisable by the user to drill into asset or location
• Aircraft are color coded to indicate early, late and on-time arrival based on schedule
• Emergency (and preventative maintenance) work orders are displayed as they happen
• Clicking on objects brings up a popup that shows the full suite of information available on that asset
• Moving assets - such as airport ground vehicles and aircraft are shown in real-time
• Ability to drill down to see the status of key operational assets, such as check-in counters, baggage carousels and elevators/escalators
• Ability to explore ‘what if’ scenarios by accessing data, applying business logic and modelling
• Master data management built in
• Modern software and web-based presentation layer with unlimited clients
• Positive feedback from users

Vic Raymond, ICT Strategy, Planning and Architecture Manager explained a key factor in the success of the system. “The system has established a strong foundation for the continuing integration of information and operational technologies allowing proactive, and in the future, predictive operations, in line with our vision of being a ‘smart’ airport. A great outcome from all involved”.