The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) announced Tuesday a new airline and passenger testbed: Smart Airline Baggage Management.
IIC member organizations GE Digital, M2Mi, and Oracle are heading the testbed project, supported by integration specialist InfoSys. Additional industry collaborators are slated to join the testbed including aircraft manufacturers and airlines.
The Smart Airline Baggage Management testbed, part of a broader aviation ecosystem vision, is aimed at reducing the instances of delayed, damaged and lost bags leading to lower economic risk exposure to the airlines; increasing the ability to report on baggage including location to prevent theft and loss; and improving customer satisfaction through better communication including new value-added services to frequent flyers.
The Smart Airline Baggage Management testbed focus is to bring together fragmented applications and systems to drive solutions to make the airlines and airports more efficient during check-in and subsequent baggage handling across the aviation ecosystem for the benefit of passengers.
The solution includes cloud-based airline applications and databases, cloud based analytics, and an M2M and IoT platform to connect, manage and secure realtime data and events from smart luggage. The testbed starts at remote check-in by the passenger and ends when the passenger retrieves their baggage at the destination and includes complete tracking and event reporting between those two points.
GE Digital will be contributing the Predix Cloud platform – already used extensively in the airline business – to host the platform side of the testbed. Oracle will provide their airline applications built on the Oracle Airline Data Model (OADM). M2Mi will provide the M2M and IoT device management, connectivity, data handling and instream analytics to connect edge devices such as smart luggage, airport baggage trucks, scanners and beacons to the platform applications.
The M2Mi IoT platform will run on GE Predix and the Oracle Cloud and will also provide policy management and enforcement, security and encryption to deliver the critical infrastructure to pass data and alerts to and between the GE and Oracle hosted applications.
The testbed will use a range of Bluetooth, Cellular and WiFi baggage tracking devices. These will be deployed in smart luggage, permanent and reusable bag tags, airport luggage carts and across the baggage ecosystem. Phase 1 of the testbed project will offer a cloud-based ecosystem to provide connectivity to assets like bags and passenger and airport/airline equipment; provide end-to-end visibility of bags to the airline, as it is checked-in, dropped and travels via the baggage carousel, bag trolley, aircraft, connecting airport to the destination bag-pickup, and enable airlines to provide near-real-time view of their bag status to the customers.
The testbed is also aimed at addressing new baggage handling requirements in International Air Transport Association (IATA) Resolution 753 requiring more comprehensive solutions for baggage handling by June 2018.
The Smart Airline Baggage Management testbed will help airlines to comply with the IATA Resolutions on airline baggage handling being introduced in 2018, and will help to improve the visibility to the airline of the passenger and their baggage related needs end-to-end. It will allow airlines and other aviation partners to offer expanded services opening doors to new streams of revenue.
Smart connected baggage will reduce the instances of delay, damage and lost bags leading to lower economic risk exposure to the airline and agony to the passenger. Today about 6-7 bags are lost for every 1000 per statistics from SITA survey and Department of Transportation (DoT). It costs airlines $100 to repatriate a delayed bag and risk exposure for lost bag is as much as $3300/bag in USA. With global airline passenger travel targeted to double in next 20 years, any such efficiency added to the baggage handling system will have a big economic impact.
The target is to improve the airline passenger experience as they travel through the airports and reduce their total travel time. This in turn will improve the airline-passenger relationship. It will also help reduce the congestion at the airports due to delays. The increased operational efficiency will allow current airport infrastructure to handle more passengers and thus help to reduce lost productivity due to increased wait times.
Testbeds are a major focus and activity of the Industrial Internet Consortium and its members. The Testbed Working Group accelerates the creation of testbeds for the Industrial Internet and serves as the advisory body for testbed proposal activities for our members. It is the centralized group which collects testbed ideas from our member companies and provides the members with systematic and flexible guidance for new testbed proposals.
IIC’s testbeds are where the innovation and opportunities of the Industrial Internet – new technologies, new applications, new products, new services, new processes – can be initiated, thought through, and rigorously tested to ascertain their usefulness and viability before coming to market.
The testbed will combine fragmented systems driving solutions to make airlines and airports more efficient in baggage handling across the aviation ecosystem. The testbed will be hosted on Predix, GE’s cloud-based platform for the Industrial Internet. Oracle is providing airline applications built on the Oracle Airline Data Model (OADM). M2Mi is providing device management, connectivity, data handling and instream analytics to connect edge devices such as smart luggage, airport baggage trucks, scanners and beacons to the platform applications.
The M2Mi Intelligence application will run on Predix and the Oracle Cloud and will also provide policy management and enforcement, and security and encryption to the critical network infrastructure. The initial phases of the testbed will be hosted and run at M2Mi’s labs on NASA’s Research Park at the Moffett Field airfield in California.
“The success of the Industrial Internet requires team work across the ecosystem, and this testbed is a great example of collaboration,” said Shyam Nath, Industrial Internet Architect, GE Digital. By hosting the testbed on Predix and working with M2Mi and Oracle, we hope to help airlines increase efficiency and improve passenger experience.”
