Pictures of the Future    Spring 2006

An Airport that’s Ready to Fly

Demonstrating system solutions for airports is difficult. You can’t just let third parties move at will through passport checkpoints, past baggage handling systems, or over taxiways—and possibly disrupt operations as they go. With its Airport Center, Siemens is now providing a globally unique facility for planning, testing and improving these systems—in the form of a full-scale airport simulation center.

The world’s most unusual airport is located in an unremarkable building complex on a secondary road outside Fürth, near Nuremberg, Germany. Passengers checking in here are identified using sophisticated biometric methods. An SMS serves as a boarding pass, while luggage is transported by Germany’s most advanced baggage handling system. But where are the passengers flying to? There are no planes here, no runways, and there’s no tower.

The Siemens Airport Center (SAC) is a globally unique simulation and training facility covering the entire technological infrastructure of a real airport. Here you can operate baggage conveyors, parking guidance systems, or docking facilities for an airport the size of London’s Heathrow. Altogether, it took Siemens just eight months to build SAC. The facility opened at the end of 2005.

Many customers were more than ready to use its services. "The number of visitor requests is enormous," says Helmut Pawlischek, who heads the SAC. Most of them want to learn how time and money can be saved by optimizing the interactions among different new systems. Others are interested in innovative technologies from Siemens, such as mobile check-in. Frequent Flyers can download a small program to their cell phones, which they can use to check in before they even get to the airport. The airline company can then send them the boarding pass as a barcode in an SMS.

At the gate, the passenger simply places the cell phone on a reading device and the boarding pass is printed out—or the passenger is identified by previously stored biometric data and granted paperless access to the plane. In wide-body jets, such as the A380 from Airbus, as many as 800 passengers may be boarding at a time—so experts have to work under considerable pressure to develop a high-speed check-in system.

By 2015, the Boston Consulting Group predicts that worldwide investment in airports—many of them new projects in Asia—will reach $200 billion. "However, many airports in the U.S. and Europe also intend to modernize," says Pawlischek. They are all looking for integrated solutions based on seamlessly interacting systems. Siemens is the worldwide market leader in this field. "Many small and midsized airports lack the expertise to configure an optimal combination of the manifold individual components that are available," notes Pawlischek. But the SAC can also help operators of large airports make better use of synergies.

"Here we can demonstrate that systems work at peak efficiency only if they interact flawlessly," says Günter Menden, spokesperson of the Sector Development Board for Airports and head of the Airport Logistics Division of the Industrial Solutions and Services (I&S) Group in Nuremberg. Any user of Siemens airport technology is a customer of several Siemens groups. Biometric methods, security systems and facilities automation, for instance, are provided by Siemens Building Technologies (SBT), flight information systems by Siemens Business Services (SBS), power supply systems by Power Transmission and Distribution (PTD), baggage handling systems by I&S, related components by Automation and Drives (A&D), and the airfield lighting system also by I&S.

Menden points at the 27 display screens in the Airport Operation Center (AOC)—the control and information center for all logistics and infrastructure segments of the SAC. This is where all the activities that keep the airport running are monitored and controlled. Everything from fleet management and facility automation to flight information and baggage handling systems might be affected by the change of a single variable in highly complex flight operations. A plane that arrives, say, two hours behind schedule necessitates the redirection of maintenance vehicles, reassignment of security personnel and recalculation of storage capacities in the baggage system. "The person responsible for facility management at the AOC is automatically in the loop and may immediately decide, for instance, to lower the temperature in that part of the building by several degrees," says Menden, pointing out an example of the synergies he can simulate in the AOC.

Luggage on the Fast Track. If the AOC is the brain of this airport, the baggage handling system is its gut. Just three meters from the AOC, conveyor belts glide along noiselessly at several levels in a large hall. The SAC contains the largest such system in Germany—followed by the airports in Frankfurt and Munich. It can sort 5,000 pieces of luggage, hour after hour, but right now the transport trays hold only a few well-worn specimens. "To simulate full-capacity operation we don’t need any suitcases—the RFID tags will do," says Pawlischek. RFID tags are equipped with a chip containing luggage destination data.

At check-in, each bag is given a barcode before being placed in a tray on the conveyor system. A tag attached to the tray contains a microchip to which the barcode data is automatically transferred as it passes through a scanner gate. The tag reports the suitcase’s destination to the higher-level information technology. The system transports the luggage at a maximum speed of ten meters per second—a world record. The Siemens conveyor system also features ramps as steep as 17 °—another world record. "Such facilities are operated below ground," says Pawlischek. "When you build an airport it’s important to minimize total space in order to keep costs down."

To ensure the flawless choreography of all the conveyor belts, switches and tilt trays, 1,200 proximity switches and light barriers were installed at the SAC, which also has 545 drives. This system may resemble a graceful ballet, but its operation makes an enormous difference to an airport’s bottom line. That’s because airlines want their aircraft to be in the air, where they make money. And passengers want to get to their connecting flight fast—with their luggage, of course. "Baggage that’s delayed or gets lost drives up costs and has a negative impact on an airline’s image," explains Pawlischek. The "minimum connecting time" (MCT) is therefore one of the most important variables in this business. At the Munich airport, for instance, the MCT is less than 30 minutes, thanks to Siemens technology—yet another worldwide record.

To save time and money, baggage handling systems also need to be highly reliable. Thanks to a new Siemens system at Terminal 3 of the Beijing airport, for instance, the airport will be able to more than double its capacity from 28 million to 60 million passengers. Development engineers are continually testing the interaction of the software and hardware for this enormous facility at the SAC. And that’s good news for China’s capital city, which will be able to celebrate the terminal’s commissioning much sooner. The SAC also comes in handy as a training center for customers. Dozens of Beijing Airport employees, for instance, will be able to practice various scenarios and gain their initial experience right here in the Franconia region of southern Germany.

The SAC’s elegant test lounge is usually deserted. But airports around the globe are becoming increasingly crowded. That’s a big challenge, particularly for security systems. Travelers must be positively identified during check-in and boarding, and personnel must always be able to prove that they have access rights to specific areas.

Facial ID. The 3D facial scanner at the SAC shows how fast and reliable identification can be. Several years ago, researchers at Siemens Corporate Technology developed this innovative biometric identification system, which is now being introduced to the market in a collaborative venture involving U.S.-based Viisage. (see Pictures of the Future, Spring 2003, Biometric Technology). The system works by projecting a multicolored grid onto the face of the person to be identified. Using the grid, a video camera then records the distances between specific facial points—points that are unique to each individual. The system compares these reference points with previously stored data. This technology substantially reduces disturbing effects, such as those caused by lighting or an unfavorable head position, that often reduce the effectiveness of 2D methods.

Although the SAC has no mall, planners know that airports are increasingly turning into adventure worlds, complete with shopping and recreational areas. "People in airports should spend as little time as possible waiting at check-in counters, and more time shopping or relaxing," says Pawlischek. And people must feel secure. At the SAC, development engineers are testing new monitoring systems that automatically recognize potential risk factors. Here, they use specialized software that constantly compares data from surveillance cameras with previously learned risk situations. Examples of what cameras may look for include abandoned suitcases or a person who has just collapsed.

Processes on the taxiways are changing as well. Today, pilots follow a path marked by light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which are controlled from the airport’s AOC. During docking to the gangway, a video camera films the plane and a software program continuously recomputes the remaining distance. The data is projected onto a monitor for the pilot to see. To be on the safe side, the SAC team demonstrates the airfield lighting using only a motor vehicle in the parking lot. Given that the real airport at Nuremberg is just a few kilometers away, experts want to make sure that no aircraft tries to land at the wrong address.
                                                                                                               Katrin Nikolaus