Innovative ICT to build a smart airport

In the era of globalization, airports have become bridges and links connecting the world. During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, my country will build 33 new airports and complete 51 hub airport renovation and expansion projects. In addition, three major airport clusters will be built in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta regions. China's airport industry will usher in a new stage of development.

In recent years, the concept of smart airports has been widely recognized in the industry and has gradually been put into practice. So, what is a smart airport? Admittedly, there is no clear and unified definition in the industry so far, but from the perspective of informatization, with the continuous development and maturity of ICT technology, emerging technologies represented by cloud computing, big data, and the Internet of Things have begun to take root in some airports.

With this round of innovation and application of new technologies, the outline of "smart airport" has become increasingly clear. The innovation and application of ICT technology, especially the introduction of cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and big data, can simplify things, and will give traditional ICT systems capabilities that they do not have. It will reconstruct the airport's information flow and bring significant benefits in terms of operational safety and security of smart airports, airport operating efficiency, and service quality for passengers and businesses.

Through the innovation of ICT technology, the "Smart Airport" will focus on the three major themes of "safety, efficiency, and service", from aircraft landing, guidance, positioning, cabin opening, ground service, cabin closing, push-out, guidance, taxiing out, and take-off; from passengers arriving at the airport, check-in, security check, waiting, boarding, baggage collection, etc., throughout the airport flight flow, passenger flow and other links, to build a global perception-analysis-feedback capability.

First, in terms of airport operation safety, the safe operation guarantee area needs to cover the airport flight area, terminal area, and public area. At present, video surveillance is an important means of ensuring airport safety operations. In the field of airport security, Huawei innovatively reconstructs the airport security system through video cloud monitoring, realizes unified storage and unified call of video storage images, and adopts front-end + back-end intelligent processing technology on this basis to structure the unstructured video data, and conducts all-round intelligent recognition through front-end intelligent perception and back-end big data analysis.

Take the airfield as an example. As the scale of the airport expands, the layout of the airfield becomes more complex. The apron traffic flow is large, and the operating vehicles and operating personnel of various businesses such as airline catering, aviation fuel, and airlines are complicated. High-density operations on the apron have become normalized. Based on traditional video surveillance, due to its scattered construction, most of it is deployed on the jet bridge, near and far parking positions, and the overall coverage rate of the apron is not high. There are blind spots in monitoring, which seriously affect its monitoring quality. It is difficult to meet the requirements of all-weather, full-coverage, all-round, and full-process real-time monitoring of important areas of the airfield such as the airport apron, taxiway, and runway. To address the above problems, Huawei provides a 4K panoramic intelligent monitoring solution. The overall solution architecture is as follows:

The front-end deploys 4K ultra-high-definition gun cameras and high-magnification high-speed dome cameras to provide full coverage of the flight zone. At the platform level, panoramic stitching technology is applied to seamlessly stitch 4K ultra-high-definition video surveillance images to form a global viewpoint, breaking through the limitations of split-lens display screens. In addition, the application of panoramic video intelligent analysis technology can realize intelligent applications such as one-click viewing, high-low correlation, aircraft tracking, and flight signage for the flight zone. For example, flight signage can obtain the location and flight information of the aircraft through docking with the airport operation system, ADS-B system, and radar system, and complete the tracking and display of the flight in the panoramic video surveillance screen. The key information such as the fuselage number, flight number, and airline to which the flight belongs can be displayed in the form of signage, realizing the global flight tracking visibility of the airport. Through the innovation and application of 4K panoramic seamless stitching and video intelligent analysis technology, the full-space visual operation monitoring effect of the flight zone of "what you think is what you see, what you see is what you get" is finally achieved.

In the terminal area, intelligent video analysis and recognition technology can be used to realize functions such as passenger behavior analysis, motion target detection, person loitering detection, item left/removed detection, passenger crowd density analysis, passenger flow analysis, and passenger headcount analysis. It can free monitoring personnel from simple, low-level, repetitive labor such as "staring at the screen 24 hours a day" so that they can focus on more advanced work such as pre-prevention and in-process handling of security incidents. Effective event analysis can be carried out based on intelligent visual analysis to achieve advance warning, in-process handling, and post-event evidence collection.

In terms of airport operation efficiency, my country currently has 28 airports with an annual passenger throughput of more than 10 million. In 2016, the annual passenger throughput of China exceeded 1 billion, and maintained an average annual growth rate of 10%. With the rapid growth of the number of passengers, the capacity of many airports has been close to saturation, and the airport operation efficiency needs to be improved urgently. Taking the ground service link as an example, the operator needs to reasonably dispatch various airport ground service resources, and complete the ground service guarantee for passengers, cargo and mail and flights in accordance with the standards of the civil aviation industry, ensure the safety of air transportation, flight punctuality, improve ground operation efficiency, and reduce operation costs. However, the airport ground operation is facing severe challenges:

• With the surge in the number of flights, the number of vehicles, equipment and ground staff working on the apron and outdoors has also increased dramatically. Efficient dispatching and monitoring require a wireless dispatching environment to meet the new information dispatching needs;
• The original dispatching mode that only relies on voice cluster intercom can no longer meet the demand for dispatching and execution efficiency and quality in the face of the surge in passenger, cargo and flight volumes;
• The manual transmission of business data such as loading manifests has increased the delay time of aircraft at airports, reduced passenger satisfaction, and civil aviation transportation has been impacted by other modes of transportation;

Huawei's airport ground handling dispatch solution based on eLTE technology can provide professional broadband trunking, data collection, and video transmission services on one network. It is deeply embedded in the airport ground handling workflow, bringing new changes and efficiency improvements to ground handling operations:

• Electronic and digital dispatch
• Voice and video dispatching enables multi-department collaboration
• Rapid response, recordability and traceability of passenger services and cargo transportation processes, enabling real-time settlement between airport and airline systems, improving efficiency and reducing management and communication costs

Taking Sanya Phoenix Airport as an example, Sanya Phoenix Airport has applied Huawei's airport eLTE ground handling dispatch solution to greatly improve the efficiency of ground service operations. According to statistics, Sanya Phoenix Airport staff use the eLTE network and terminals to make an average of more than 150 calls per person per day in the operation process, and each terminal has a data flow of 100M per day. Among them, ground services, avoidance, security checks, special vehicles, and freight account for more than 65% of the calls. During the 2017 Spring Festival travel guarantee period, 800 terminals made nearly 100,000 calls per day.

In terms of services, the airport's main service objects are passengers and on-site businesses (airlines, freight, logistics, merchants, etc.). The development and construction of smart airports focus more on providing personalized services to service objects.

For small-scale on-site enterprises (including those of small and medium-sized airlines), they usually need to build their own IT systems at the airport to support the development of their airport-related businesses. These IT systems are "small but complete", and system planning and design, equipment procurement, equipment installation, system debugging, system maintenance and other links are also indispensable. In the early stage of construction, there is a certain amount of capital cost, and the system's full life cycle operation and maintenance must also be carried out, which is expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive, especially for system operation and maintenance. Small branch enterprises often do not have the system operation and maintenance capabilities. Through the airport cloud platform, an "airport service private cloud" can be opened up to provide these corporate branches with innovative IaaS/Pass or even SaaS services. Through the airport's service private cloud, small on-site enterprises can not only save on initial IT investment, but also avoid the trouble of subsequent system operation and maintenance. They can directly deploy related systems through the airport service cloud.

For passenger services, providing passengers with an end-to-end convenient, considerate and pleasant travel experience from arrival at the airport, check-in, baggage check-in, security check, waiting, transfer, baggage collection and other links is the key content of smart airport construction. The introduction of facial recognition technology allows passengers to quickly pass through border inspection and boarding by "scanning their faces"; the introduction of IoT technology allows real-time viewing of luggage status and location during baggage check-in and baggage collection to prevent luggage loss; the introduction of WiFi positioning technology can assist airport operators in quickly counting passenger traffic and adjusting the opening status of security check channels in real time so that passengers can quickly pass through security checks; high-density WiFi coverage in the terminal allows passengers to entertain and communicate through the free WiFi network provided by the airport during the waiting process, making the boring waiting process simple and pleasant. In terms of passenger service experience, Huawei's smart airport solution will help airports create the best passenger service experience through the introduction of technologies such as IoT, big data analysis, high-quality WiFi, and biometric algorithms.

As of the end of 2016, Huawei has provided ICT products, solutions and services to more than 40 airports, airlines and air traffic control departments around the world, including more than 15 airports with an annual passenger flow of more than 30 million and 10 of the busiest airports in China. As a world-leading information and communication (ICT) solution provider, Huawei will continue to innovate around customer needs and openly cooperate with partners to create greater value for smart airports.