CASE STUDY
PART OF WHAT WE ’ RE DOING IS WE ’ RE CREATING A TRUE INTEGRATED REPOSITORY OF INFORMATION .
make managing that airport environment more efficient and effective , making it a place where our tenants can really realize their benefits with a low cost sort of land development model . For passenger experience , we ’ re looking , like many airports , at queueing technologies and at dynamic messaging .
And then , of course , for optimizing the airport , how can we leverage IoT and those smart building concepts to really efficiently manage that environment , lower our HVAC ( Heating , Ventilation and Air Conditioning ), manage our lighting , give us clues to predictive maintenance before we have the big bills of having to replace various pieces of the facility .
How has the airport used technology to make the passenger experience safer during the pandemic ?
We have a COVID recovery program . When we had our significant cuts to our capital and OPEX budgets , there was a cross functional group who looked at all the priorities and sort of said ‘ OK how do we look at passenger safety , employee safety , operational efficiency and what projects are really key there ?’
So , we ’ re looking at cloud desktops . Again , that will save us from an OPEX and a management perspective , and we will keep our staff safe . Because we know that this will be a prolonged event as we saw with our second wave here and wanting to make sure people are as productive and as effective as they can be .
In terms of 2021 , I ’ d say we ’ re moving up that innovation chain a bit . We ’ re looking at virtual information comments – can people get help through their mobile phone or through the digital displays in the airport rather than walking up to people and asking for help – in terms of social distancing – can we do that virtually ?
We ’ re looking at queue management , as part of the ACI working group , and really watching what some of the other leading airports are doing . And again , can we help people as to when they should enter those condensed areas ? So , again , that ’ s to provide that distancing .
And finally , can we disperse certain functions outside of the terminal ? Can we protect that perimeter and not let people have to come into the terminal to check in or to print their boarding ticket ?
We have a pilot that we ’ re actually working with Toronto on called ‘ Cups in a Suitcase ’. And we would allow this to happen perhaps in our parking areas or even in our premium outlet mall on Airport City . Again , this is about letting people do what are traditionally functions that have to be done in-terminal outside of our terminal .
You mentioned earlier , the innovation expansion strategy that the airport has got . How is that going to be used to allow your staff to apply greater insights through data ?
Currently we have two big rock projects . One is our public address system . It was quite archaic and we ’ re looking at significant modernization and integration with our content management tools , with our FIDS ( Flight Information Display System ) and our digital displays .
So , we ’ re looking at how we can get that public health information out to passengers in a dynamic way without having to go to a vendor to help us script various messages . We ’ re looking at that integration platform , that content platform and to provide visual pages to passengers across the terminal .
The second big rock that we ’ re looking at right now is really expanding on telecommuting , so like all airports we rushed and got a large percentage of our staff to work from home , but really I wouldn ’ t say that we have all the tools for real collaboration and for a real modern workplace sort of environment .
Part of what we ’ re doing is we ’ re creating a true integrated repository of information . And I ’ m not going to use the word ‘ data warehouse ’ because that tends to be really about reporting tools which tend to be after the fact . But we ’ re looking at an integrated set of hubs . One is the data itself in a way that we can leverage it for algorithms , for reporting tools , etc .
The second is really about an event hub and I think that ’ s where things are a little different . Can we actually grab messages through a messaging environment that are coming from various systems ? And then can we use and orchestrate those messages to other systems and stakeholders ?
So , if we think about staff , they will have a great integrated environment to leverage all kinds of different tools and capabilities on for predictive analysis modelling , etc . And then for events , let ’ s say we get an
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