Tag Archives: Technology

Optimization with Gate Management Systems

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With limited gate resources, airport traffic constraints, and dynamic flight schedules, it can be challenging to manage gate availability. When confronting this challenge, more and more airports have switched to a Gate Management System (GMS) as a way to manage their Gate and Aircraft Parking assignment process.

GMS offers an intuitive solution for allocating gates according to flight schedules and arrival times. Not only does the GMS reduce the complexity of managing aircraft parking and gate assignments, but it also detects potential issues, in real-time, by monitoring aircraft scheduling and resource allocation to find conflicts and report discrepancies.

GMS also helps to enhance communication between airports and airlines regarding changed gate assignments as well as alerting of erroneous gate assignment discrepancies. GMS solutions offer automatic alerting capabilities which eliminate back and forth email/phone communication for automated alerts that send in various ways.  

By using airlines’ flight schedules to assign equipment and parking space for aircraft effectively, the GMS also automizes the gate assignment process. Using an algorithm to automatically calculate the gates to be scheduled for an aircraft based on size and type of aircraft, the GMS correctly assigns boarding gates and manages gate assignments. Since all flight schedules upload into an airport’s GMS, historical information regarding gate assignments is captured to provide insightful information such as airline gate usage, etc.   

With a GMS Airports can significantly increase their operational efficiencies and enhance communication between stakeholders.  But more than streamlining the gate assignment process, airports can also improve their passengers’ travel experience and provide airlines with cost savings by minimizing the time aircraft spend taxiing on the runway. As airports are seeing all the benefits of having a GMS, it is becoming more and more a necessary tool needed for the modern day airport.

Big Data in the Aviation Industry

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Information is always flying in and out of our hands in this modern age – but to really take advantage of this flood of big data, it has to be grasped and analyzed so proper decision-making strategies can be used.

Relation to Aviation Industry:

The handling and understanding of big data is of growing importance for the aviation industry. With a growing traveller demographic, airports will have more and more information to deal with. It will be important to know everything from enplanements, revenue streams and maintenance activity to productivity analysis, security and growth drivers on a constant basis.

Understanding of big data will help predict future trends, behaviors, increase efficiency and be ahead of the curve. This knowledge is very important with global air passenger traffic increasing by 4% yearly, and freight traffic increasing by 5.1% per annum for the next 15 years, according to the Airports Council International—meaning there will be 7 billion passengers total and 170 million tons of freight by 2020.

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BIG DATA: Information gathered by Gartner Inc. as posted by the Wall Street Journal on February 10, 2015.

Challenges of “Big Data”:

With a significant growth in airline passengers, the importance of data analysis in solving problems and predicting future events is becoming more and more apparent. Sorting through the flood of information and figuring out what is actually needed is the biggest issue of the modern age.

You need all the proper skills and capabilities, the ability to integrate multiple data sources and bring together big data technology with your existing infrastructure if you want to be able to properly understand what you’re taking in.

To draw conclusions from data you’ve collected, you also need to be very aware of your biases. If you aren’t, the interpretations of the data will be skewed and incorrect – costing precious time and money.

You also need the systems and people in place to handle and interpret the mass of data that will constantly be coming in. There needs to be thought put into what you want to figure out, how and when the information was gathered, and build tools to process the information and lay it out in an understandable manner.

Don’t let important data fly through your hands at inopportune times – learn more about data analysis and figure out how to make your airport more efficient and prepare for the near future.