COPENHAGEN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT - RFID ON PASSENGERS
With focus on constant improvements in the airport facilities and services, Copenhagen Airport is testing cutting-edge technology led and developed by the consortium called SPOPOS (Danish acronym for tracking technology personal and operator services).
Challenges
The SPOPOS project was initiated by the commercial department of Copenhagen Airport for several reasons: It should be possible to improve the passenger service with individual information e.g. about time to gate in order to avoid late passengers and consequently delayed flights. The project should also generate large amounts of data to use in passenger flow analysis: How many people pass through a particular shop area? How long time do passengers dwell in specific rest areas?
SPOPOS can accurately document, e.g., changes in passenger’s behavior before and after gate announcements are given with a shorter notice. Finally, it could potentially be used for proximity marketing within the airport. The increased use of mobile phones for handling travel information prompted the SPOPOS project team to develop an integrated location-aware service system for passengers, airlines and airport management. The system, named SPOPOS, deploys Bluetooth and RFID for location detection of passengers while individual information for passengers is delivered via the mobile phones.
Lean boarding
Getting passengers on-board a flight is normally achieved by pushing information about departure time, gate number and boarding status to information displays. Most modern airports are reluctant to use public loudspeakers and they only do so when passengers already are too late and are about to miss their flight. This push-approach has been optimized for decades but still it has some serious drawbacks. Passengers do not always pay attention to the information displayed; sometimes they misread the displays and sometimes they simply forget the information. Copenhagen Airport, with 21 million passengers departing per year, is forced to make numerous public calls for late-at-gate passengers on a busy day.
Gatecaller – proactive boarding process
The Gatecaller is a functionality that provides an easy means for the personnel at the gate to locate late passengers, and then enables contact to be made by phone call or text message, urging the passengers to hurry to their gate. The airport is divided into 25 zones and the passengers are visible within a rough circle. Each passenger carrying an RFID tag or deploying Bluetooth is visible to the personnel at the gate as a green, yellow or red dot in a graphical overview of the airport depending on their time-distance from the departure gate. In calculating the time-distance, SPOPOS takes into account the walking time plus waiting time e.g. queues. If shown as a red dot, the passenger is actually already too late for boarding, and they will delay the flight if no action is taken. In this way the gate personnel can decide whether to wait for the passenger or start off-loading baggage. Tracking and tracing passengers throughout the entire logistics chain provides considerable benefits to all parties involved, e.g. management, employees and customers.
