Airport operators have long looked not only to measure and record the number of passengers that move through both their landside and airside facilities, but also to discover more about how they move through the airport and what they do while they are there. The evolving BlipTrack system is one such tool that helps them to improve efficiency of passenger traffic flow
BlipTrack is the product of Blip Systems, a company established in 2003 with its headquarters near Aalborg, Denmark. Described as a business intelligence company, it designed and developed the BlipTrack sensor agnostic analysis platform, which was launched in 2007.
BlipTrack started out, recalls Blip Systems marketing manager Christian Carstens, as a queue measurement solution intended to help airports comply with service-level agreements and evaluate key performance indicators (KPIs). In 2010, a Queue Prediction module was developed to provide airports and their passengers with accurate wait time information.
The BlipTrack Flow module was then launched in 2012 to provide accurate flow information on the use of facilities, services and retail. Plus, over the last couple of years, several advanced capacity-forecasting modules have been introduced to help airport managers efficiently match staffing resources with demand.
BlipTrack is currently used at 25 international airports, including JFK Airport in New York, Cincinnati, Copenhagen, Birmingham, Oslo, Bristol, Dublin, Brussels, Geneva, San Diego, Keflavik and Edinburgh.
Handling passenger flow smoothly and efficiently is key to the success of an airport and its image, Carstens points out. Airport operators want passengers to enjoy a first-class airport experience, from the moment they enter the car park to boarding the plane.
Moreover, he notes, air travel has grown considerably over the last couple of decades, putting pressure on airport infrastructure and processes. But capacity expansion can be costly, so accurate wait time and flow information is crucial to providing a premium customer experience, improving capacity planning and maximising revenue (especially revenue from retail sales).
Looking to maximise non-aviation revenue and accurately match staffing and other resources with passenger demand, airport operators were keen to be able to accurately measure not only passenger numbers, but passenger flows. BlipTrack offers one way of doing this by making use of the fact that so many travellers will be carrying some sort of mobile electronic device. In fact, a recent Expedia survey found that 94% of leisure travellers have a mobile device with them, meaning that data collection from such devices can accurately provide hard numbers of a significant percentage of passengers.
BlipTrack sensors detect mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. By identifying the devices as they pass multiple sensors, specific and accurate statistical information, such as travel times, dwell times and movement patterns, become apparent. The sensors are independent of light, work around the clock, require no maintenance and do not interfere with existing WiFi networks.
Both real-time and historical data can be presented in a web-based user interface with a series of dashboards. Data can be extracted through various output methods, allowing for easy and rapid integration into existing management systems.
With sensors that track the movement of passengers´ mobile devices, airports can accurately measure and predict wait times, while simultaneously providing data about how passengers move and use the airport.
Airports can retrieve both live and historical data about specific patterns, such as entrance and exit usage, walking routes and time spent in various areas, such as security, retail, lounges, at gates and elsewhere. The patterns can be averaged over a day, a week, a month, as well as a specific time of day, a specific holiday, etc. This enhances an understanding of how disruptions or changes affect standard behaviour, says Carstens, and enables the airport to add value to existing facilities and new investments to unlock new business opportunities.
Any combination of data can be extracted for measurement, both in real-time and historically, to provide the desired output, such as:
• Queue times and occupancy and flow per area, per flight
• Origin/destination network diagrams
• Auto-profiling passenger behavior from entrance to gate, minute-by-minute
• Forecasting occupancy per shop/restaurant/other area, per flight
• Forecasting occupancy and shopping time per flight as a function of check-in/security/gate announcement time/gate allocation.
The statistical combinations can be as generalised or precise as airport management wishes it to be for review and optimisation.
Measuring movement patterns is crucial to realising greater efficiency when planning new construction initiatives and for optimising the position of signage, processes, services and general layout, Carstens explains.
Furthermore, to comply with service level agreements (SLAs) and to evaluate or challenge KPIs, it is important to measure and predict queue and flow. This provides airports with resource effectiveness visibility for greater processing efficiency.
Plus, as the solution measures passenger flow in real time, a system such as BlipTrack can provide early warning when predefined thresholds are exceeded. This enables airport authorities to proactively initiate countermeasures before the situation escalates, for instance by opening additional processing lines.
And by adding third-party data sources, such as flight information and passenger data, airports can forecast passenger volume and show-up profiles generated per weekday, carrier, flight type, etc. This allows airports to simulate the consequences of changing production capacity, to automatically and accurately scale staffing resources with passenger demand, both on the fly and for days, weeks and months to come, without affecting KPIs.
Benefits related specifically to airside operations are significant, Carstens insists. “We are able to collect and filter data from a variety of data sources, such as an airport’s operational database (an AODB), boarding pass scanners, WiFi networks and more. The information helps operational managers get the passengers out to the gate on time and planners to scale capacity with demand.”
