SIEMENS

Gazing out the window of a plane approaching Madrid is like going back in time. The barren highlands on the outskirts of the Spanish capital are dotted with small Castilian villages that look like relics of bygone centuries cast in stone. Such a view gives the observer a sense of what Madrid might have looked like after the city was founded in the Middle Ages, when the first settlements were established alongside a rustic Moorish castle known as the Alcázar.

Today, Madrid is the geographical, political, and cultural center of Spain - and with a population of about 3.3 million (6.3 million in the metropolitan area), it’s also the third-largest city in the EU. The city continues to grow, as some 400,000 people have been added to the population since 2001. Efficient logistics systems are thus crucial for ensuring a smooth daily routine in the Spanish capital and its surrounding region.

Madrid Barajas International Airport - the tenth-largest airport in the world (50 million passengers in 2008) - is already on track in this regard. Some 60 percent of the facility’s passengers now use its futuristic Terminal 4, which opened in 2006. Exceptional logistic performance is required here to ensure that everything runs like clockwork. State-owned AENA, the world’s largest airport operator, ensures top performance, largely with the help of Siemens solutions. These include security, lighting and a sophisticated baggage handling system.

The airport’s baggage handling system is the biggest and most modern one of its kind in Europe. Operating in the catacombs beneath the airport, the system can collect and sort up to 16,500 pieces of luggage per hour from 172 check-in counters and connecting flights, which it then transports at speeds of up to ten meters per second to gates or baggage-claim areas on conveyor belts with a total length of 104 kilometers. Each piece of luggage has to arrive at its gate within 25 minutes, even if that gate is located at the terminal for intercontinental flights, which is nearly three kilometers away. "Siemens was the only bidder at that time able to provide the technology that could win this race against time", says Nerea Torres, who is responsible for airports at Siemens Mobility in Madrid.

AENA also commissioned Siemens in 2008 to reduce the energy consumption of its already efficient baggage handling system by 30 percent by 2011 - and to do so without installing additional hardware. "Right now, for example, we’re optimizing parameters in the control software so that we can adjust the system’s operation to match the actual number of bags to be transported," Torres explains. "This prevents things like having entire conveyor belt segments running without any baggage." Efforts here have been successful, as Siemens experts have already reduced energy consumption by around 15 percent.

Wind Power at Las Palmas. Efficiency is a top priority overall at AENA, which operates all of Spain’s airports and around 30 others around the world. "We’re always looking to reduce energy consumption at every one of our airports," says José Manuel Hesse Martin, who is responsible for sustainability issues at AENA. "One of the areas we’re focusing on is lighting. Terminal 4, for example, was designed to ensure that as much outside light as possible shines into the building. We’re also using renewable energy. For example, we now produce more energy with wind turbines at the Las Palmas airport in Gran Canaria than the facility actually needs, and we channel the surplus into the public grid."

AENA also plans to test diverse energy optimization measures in 2010 at a small, yet-to-be-selected airport, and here too the company would be helped by Siemens. "This will be our green test lab," says Hesse. "Whether it’s LED lighting, intelligent building technologies, or the generation and utilization of energy from various renewable sources - we will use the results to develop standards that will ultimately be applied at our other airports. The optimization of the baggage handling system in Barajas is only the beginning."

Those who pick up their bags at Barajas Airport can head directly to a subway station and step into a train that will quickly and comfortably take them to the center of Madrid. The city’s subway is the world’s third-longest such network. Only New York and London have longer networks. It is also one of the fastest-growing metro systems in the world. In fact, its total length has more than doubled since 1994. Passengers don’t have to wait long for trains, either. With intervals of only around five minutes, the subway is more than capable of competing with automotive transportation. The system’s 13 lines safely transport 2.5 million people a day to a total of 318 stations, thanks in part to state-of-theart signaling technology from Siemens.