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Airport2030

Effizienter Flughafen 2030

Project Description

In the project Effizienter Flughafen 2030 (Efficient Airport 2030) the Institute of Telematics investigates how passenger processes in airport terminals can be optimized using information technology. This is one of four key issues investigated by the project searching for processes and technological approaches for improved airport operations using the example of Hamburg Airport. Aside from passenger processes, the project investigates and optimizes ground processes for aircraft handling, aircraft configurations with a view to ground processes and airport accessibility. This shall produce a measurable contribution for increasing quality, overall performance and environmental sustainability.

The project is one of three landmark projects of Hamburg’s aviation cluster, which won the competition as outstanding example of a cluster of excellence organized by the Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The goal of the competition is to strengthen the innovative capacity of Germany’s most effective regional clusters from business and research putting them in the direction to the international top position. The cluster funding of 40 million Euro provided by the BMBF is utilized in parts for funding the three landmark projects. Apart from the Hamburg University of Technology, the project is conducted by the Hamburg Airport, Airbus, Siemens, the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the University of Hamburg, the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, as well as the medium-sized businesses AlsterAero and mb + Partner.

As approach for optimizing passenger processes the Institute of Telematics develops and assesses a device for digital boarding assistance, which integrates passengers and luggage into the IT automation chain in terminals. Over the past years many activities of airport or airline staff have been atomized using IT, e.g. check-in, dealing with lists of passengers and luggage handling. Passengers not being considered as active elements are now missing links in the information chain for process optimizations. Thus the device to be developed shall turn its passive role into an active. Having a size of a credit card and wireless network access it shall be applied for interaction with terminal systems and for localizing the passenger.

In a first phase of the project, a prototype of the digital boarding assistance (“DigiBA”) has been developed at the Institute of Telematics. It allows the development and testing of passenger flow control concepts. In interviews with experts of the Hamburg Airport promising applications of the DigiBA were identified which will be developed in future steps of the project. The device enables the passenger to send messages to retrieve information. Additionally, the device is capable to receive messages in order to exchange important information, for example flight schedule changes or the remaining time until the boarding. The passenger can confirm the reception of important messages, thus the airport can communicate directly with the passenger.

Future project phases focus on the localization of passengers and on location-based services, like for example indoor-navigation.

Links

Project homepage: http://www.airport2030.de/

Publications

Björn Greßmann, Helge Klimek and Volker Turau. Intelligent Passenger Flows in Airport Terminals Using a Digital Boarding Assistance. In Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Intelligent Transportation (WIT2011), March 2011. Hamburg, Germany.
[BibTeX] [Abstract] [PDF]
@InProceedings{WIT2011C10, author = {Björn Greßmann and Helge Klimek and Volker Turau}, title = {Intelligent Passenger Flows in Airport Terminals Using a Digital Boarding Assistance}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Intelligent Transportation (WIT2011)}, day = {22-23}, month = mar, year = 2011, location = {Hamburg, Germany}, }
Abstract: In this paper we present a Digital Boarding Assistance (DigiBa) system for passengers in airport terminals. By providing navigation, notification and information services, passengers are enabled to move efficiently through the terminal. Based on functional requirements of such a system, the paper presents a prototype implementation on an embedded mobile device with restricted resources. Challenges concerning channel access in dense networks and indoor navigation on a device with limited hardware capabilities are outlined.
Helge Klimek, Björn Greßmann and Volker Turau. Indoor Navigation and Location Based Services Scenario for Airports. Technical Report urn:nbn:de:gbv:830-tubdok-10856, Hamburg University of Technology, Hamburg, Germany, February 2011.
[BibTeX] [Abstract] [PDF]
@TechReport{Telematik-Klick_Gressmann_Turau-INLBS-TechReport, author = {Helge Klimek and Björn Greßmann and Volker Turau}, title = {Indoor Navigation and Location Based Services Scenario for Airports}, number = {urn:nbn:de:gbv:830-tubdok-10856}, institution = {Hamburg University of Technology}, address = {Hamburg, Germany}, month = feb, year = 2011, }
Abstract: This report describes usage scenarios of the architecture for indoor navigation and location based services (INLBS) developed in the Airport2030 project. The expandable architecture offers a framework and predefined services with a runtime environment and aims at enabling ubiquitous INLBS in any building with the users’ mobile device. The architecture consists of a mobile user platform (MUP) installed on mobile devices and a stationary facility platform (SFP) which is running on backend servers. For communication between MUP and SFP a communication and positioning infrastructure (CPI) is used. The SFP abstracts from different mobile hardware and communication and ranging technologies for ease of development. A runtime environment contains the service container which invokes life cycle functionality of the different services. Applications which are accessed from the MUP are developed using the services in the service container.
Björn Greßmann, Helge Klimek and Volker Turau. Towards Ubiquitous Indoor Location Based Services and Indoor Navigation. In Proceedings of the 7th IEEE Workshop on Positioning Navigation and Communication (WPNC2010), March 2010. Dresden, Germany.
[BibTeX] [Abstract] [PDF]
@InProceedings{WPNC10, author = {Björn Greßmann and Helge Klimek and Volker Turau}, title = {Towards Ubiquitous Indoor Location Based Services and Indoor Navigation}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7th IEEE Workshop on Positioning Navigation and Communication (WPNC2010)}, day = {11-12}, month = mar, year = 2010, location = {Dresden, Germany}, }
Abstract: Outdoor navigation services have become ubiquitously available due to small handheld devices such as GPS enabled mobile phones or dedicated mobile navigation systems. Two main drivers were necessary in order to provide widespread location based services: Acquiring positioning information with a certain degree of precision and widespread (mobile) access to computer networks to use the position information with a large information basis such as the Internet. Envisioned is a future, where indoor navigation and location based services are used as naturally as outdoor location based services are now. To achieve this long term vision where users seamlessly navigate for example from work desk to departure gate at the airport and use location based services on the way, various challenges have to be solved. In this paper, these challenges and open issues are discussed. The paper proposes an architecture which abstracts from different mobile devices and localization technologies. Additionally, it sketches the use of indoor topology information to increase the accuracy of indoor localization. These two presented concepts form a basis for a transition period until standards for ubiquitous indoor location based services have emerged.

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