SMART AIRPORT SYSTEM

Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology, SD India, Panipat, India

Computing, Staffordshire University, U.K.

Abstract: This paper first presents four essential characteristics of Smart Airport System in the upcoming era of ubiquitous

computing: natural user interface, automatic capture of class events and experience, context-awareness and proactive service,

collaborative work support. Then it elaborates the details in the design and implementation of the ongoing Smart Classroom project.

Finally, it concludes by some self-evaluation of the project’s present accomplishment and description of its future research directions.

Keywords: Ubiquitous Computing, Intelligent Environment, Multimodal Human- Computer Interaction, Smart Airport System.

1. Introduction: Smart Airport SystemWith the growth of population in major urban areas and the accelerated increase in number of airports, the airport management

system is becoming generically complex. The problem of airport complexity, differently from what many might think, not only

affects the day-to-day life of citizens but also has a great impact on business and economic activities. These issues therefore

generate less income, affecting the sustainable growth of cities throughout the world. Considering current problems of airport,

traffic management, security management, parking management, and control and planning, especially fearing the consequences

of their medium and long term effects, both practitioners and the scientific communities have make every effort to tackle

overcrowding in large urban networks. Research has been carried out basically towards the design and specification of future

airport management solutions featuring autonomy, putting the user in the centre of all concerns and largely oriented to services.

Such efforts were eventually to culminate in the emergence of the concept of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), basically

relying on a distributed and advanced communication infrastructure favoring interaction in virtually all level, from users to

services, vehicles to vehicles, vehicles to infrastructure, security and so forth. Interoperability and integration are critical in this

scenario. More futuristic though is the perspective in which users will play rather a passive role and be taken off the whole

process, which will ultimately be managed by the system only, to which, autonomous driving is expected to be an important

ingredient. Although this view may seem quite hypothetical, it is capable to stimulate and encourage much advancement in a

wide spectrum of multidisciplinary fields, from engineering and computer science to sociology and urban planning and design.

In this work we basically recall many of the different aspects involved in the original definition of ITS and identify potential

applications of the ubiquitous computing concept (sometimes hereafter referred to as ubicomp). Instead of defining a novel

perspective for what has been recently coined Ubiquitous Transportation Systems (UTS), we prefer to see ITS from a ubiquitous

perspective, emphasizing those characteristics that actually turn ITS into ubiquitous systems. Therefore, ITS is inherently

ubiquitous! Besides ubiquity, pervasiveness, ambient awareness and intelligence are equally addressed as complementary and

conceptually related technologies. In this system, I will discuss on requirements for future urban smart airport system so as it is

possible for us to better understand why the whole bunch of technologies presented later on are important. Those are then

presented and briefly discussed in the following section. Ubiquitous transportation is then presented later on, finally followed by

some observations, conclusions drawn and suggestions for future work.

Basic Airport Operations

In the Airport 1.0 phase, airports focus on capabilities necessary for safe and efficient management of landings, departures, and

other aircraft operations. They offer basic passenger services, including check-in, boarding, security, baggage pick-up, and

moderate retail, food, and beverage services. Typically, these airports operate in a landlord model, where the airport/landlord

provides the real estate, while airlines, concessionaires, and other tenants design and implement their own business environments.

Airports exhibit highly evolved operational efficiencies, but pay insufficient attention to passenger experience. Operations,

systems, and business units are likely to be highly siloed, making it difficult for different entities to collaborate across business

boundaries. While there is always an airport-wide master strategic plan, the airport business units and tenants procure and

implement technologies in a stovepipe fashion, with little ability for information sharing and centralized management without

costly and often suboptimal systems integration.

Smart Airports

The smart airport comprises that fully develop the power of emerging and growing technologies, with advanced sense evaluate

react capabilities. Systems are built around a “digital grid”: a single, converged, often carrier-class IP network that enables high-

speed broadband traffic throughout the entire ecosystem, including the airport, airport city, airlines, seaport, logistics, authorities,

and other parties. The digital grid is the airport’s nervous system; touching and managing every point of interaction. By enabling

the exchange of real-time information, and airport-wide process integration, smart airports significantly improve operational

efficiencies, passenger services, and advanced security capabilities. They also take passenger experience to new heights by

delivering a range of personalized services enabled by seamless exchange of passenger data to anticipate needed services. Broad

process integration among airlines, retailers, fuel providers, caterers, and other ecosystem partners creates new benefits along the

entire value chain.

Figure- 1

Figure 1. Agents

2. Current scenario:

2.1. Agents:

Agents can be defined as a piece of software that operates for a user or other program in a relationship of agency.

Agents are the set of programs that perform tasks such as retrieving and delivering information and automating

repetitive tasks. In other words we can define agents as a person who is authorized to act on behalf of another

party and show their interest. The agents are not strictly invoked for a task, but activate themselves.

Some of the related agents include:

Intelligent agents- in particular exhibiting some aspect of Artificial Intelligence, such as learning and reasoning.

Autonomous agents- capable of modifying the way in which they achieve their objectives.

Distributed agents- being executed on physically distinct computers.

Multi-agent systems- distributed agents that do not have the capabilities to achieve an objective alone and thus

must communicate.

Mobile agents- agents that can relocate their execution onto different processors.

2.2. Autonomous Agents: Autonomous agents can be a software and robotic body that are capable of independent

action in open, random environments. We can say that it is an organism surrounded by a part of an environment

that senses that environment and acts on it, over time, in pursuit of its own agenda and so as to effect what it senses in the future. It is active without the need for the direct interference of other agents (software or human).

Figure 3. Autonomous Agents

2.3. Intelligent Agents: Intelligent agents are programs that carry out a task unconfirmed and apply some degree of

intelligence to the task. The intelligent agent software may consist of embedded technology within the mobile

device, servers on the Internet, and programs within applications on the mobile network.

Figure 3. Intelligent Agent

2.4. Multi Agent: Multi-agent is a type of agent where multiple agents (including software agents, robots and people)

may interact; it acts as the problem-solving and control architectures for both single-agent and multiple-agent

systems. The multi-agent system has a number of applications, including control processes, mobile robots, air-

traffic management and intelligent information retrieval. The implementations of internal and external interactions

between the various agents and with system users respectively are shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Multi agent

The advantages of having a multi-agent system are:

They allow agents to work at a problem in parallel (and so are fast) They allow agents to team up dynamically to solve a problem (and so are flexible) They allow agents to take over where others fail (and so increase reliability)

3. Technologies involved in Smart Airport in the field of ubiquitous computing

The anyplace/any time/any means vision of ubiquitous computing has explosive impact on academics, industry, government and daily life. This emergence is the natural result of research and technological advances in wireless and sensor networks, embedded systems, mobile computing, distributed computing, agent technologies, autonomic computing and communication. Many novel but more specific computing mechanisms and paradigms have been recently driven from the broad view of ubiquitous computing, such as pervasive, context-aware, sentient, invisible, disappearing, everyday, wearable, proactive, autonomic, organic, sustainable, handheld, palpable, amorphous, spray, embedded computing, ambient intelligence, etc. 

We have generalized four characteristics of Smart Airport, which are: Air Traffic Control, automatic capture of class events and experience, context-awareness and proactive service, collaborative work support.

3.1. Air Traffic Control System: The air traffic management system is an advanced overlook, workstation, airport and

enroots coordination system that permits controllers to manage electronic flight data online, using touch sensitive

display screens. The air traffic management system automates flight data transactions, eliminating the need for

paper handling, reducing voice communications and minimizing heads down time.

3.1.1. Collision-Avoidance Tool for Air Traffic: The Collision-Avoidance tool for air traffic systems provide greater traffic management capacities than is available in without this tool. This tool has a combined computational geometry algorithms with high-performance hardware to develop one of the fastest and

most efficient collision-avoidance engines worldwide. The massive scalability of this engine together with its superior algorithms puts customers in a position to efficiently manage much higher air traffic volumes than previous systems.

Air Traffic management Technology: As owner and operator of Canada's civil air navigation system, NAV CANADA provides air navigation services for over 11 million aircraft movements per year - safely, efficiently and cost effectively.

We deliver these services using innovative air traffic management (ATM) technologies developed by NAV CANADA engineers for use in our own system. All of our ATM technology solutions are built using a collaborative process that ensures end user and customer acceptance. Each system is flexible and scalable in order to meet the unique traffic demands of each site. System deployment is supported by comprehensive training and lifecycle support, ensuring a safe and secure investment with continual product growth.

These operationally proven technology solutions are now available to other ANS providers.

3.2.1. Smart Transport and Parking Services:

The smart airport systems provide a complete, end-to-end passenger experience. They address all aspects of the journey in

concert with airport-related services available anytime, anywhere, making the airport an effective virtual service provider.

Real-time travel services keep passengers informed of any travel problems and offer premium services, such as valet parking or

route switching, if the passenger is at risk of being late. Intelligent transport services, a location-sensitive version of this solu-

tion, can track a traveler via a GPS-enabled Smartphone and provide pre-trip travel information, route advice based on traffic

conditions, and flight status. Value-added services such as porters and nearby or valet parking can be offered to passengers based

on their loyalty and on-time travel status. A trip concierge provides details and flight status of all trip stages on a smartphone, or

via an airport kiosk. It can also provide location-based services and alerts to help passengers through the terminal to the gate, plus

personalized hospitality and retail offerings. When accessed on a mobile phone, it can operate as an e-boarding pass as well.

3.2.2. RFID Baggage management SystemLarge numbers of people pass through airports every hour. The without RFID technology in door security can encourage the terrorism and other forms of crime due to the undetected weapons in small area. Similarly, the high concentration of people on large airliners, and the ability to use a hijacked airplane as a dangerous weapon may provide an attractive target for terrorism. The RFID passageway is the first system to combine RFID and barcode technologies into a single unit. As a major break-through in scanner technology, the RFID Tunnel arrangement achieves near-perfect read and assignment rates of no less than 99.5%. A total of twelve hybrid RFID Tunnels will be installed on the transfer lines at Doha International Airport, with a further twelve RFID units integrated into the early-storage baggage system. All the units feature dual controllers with full redundancy to ensure maximum availability.

Passenger numbers at the New Doha International Airport are predicted to reach 24 million per year, with an estimated 19,500 items of luggage an hour passing through the baggage-handling system. The new hybrid scanners will help to increase security whilst providing faster transfer times and minimising the number of lost or miss-routed items.

Crisplant is the main contractor for the baggage-handling system at Doha, which comprises high-speed tilt-tray sorters with 28 high-speed inductions and 172 discharge positions. Upper-level control systems include 25 state-of-the-art servers in a fully redundant configuration, with more than 25 workstations and laptops, 88 information monitors, 9 video walls and a fully redundant Cisco network. Following the hand-over, Crisplant will continue to maintain the baggage-handling system as part of a five-year service contract which was part of the original contract.

In addition to the installation at Doha, Crisplant has also installed the RFID Tunnels, in Helsinki Airport and has a system on permanent demonstration at their test centre in Aarhus, Denmark.

Reference

1. http://www.cengeloglu.com/pub1.html 2. http://homelandsecurity.psu.edu/discovery/centers/intelligent_agents.html 3. http://www.ercim.eu/publication/Ercim_News/enw56/botti.html 4. http://www.airport-information-systems.com/products/air-traffic-control-administration.aspx 5. http://www.airport-int.com/article/airport-management-systems-for-the-21st-century.html

6. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/architecture/Agents.aspx

7.