The Requirements
Airports typically have large and sometimes complex infrastructures, featuring elevators, escalators, moving walkways, baggage handling equipment, HVAC systems, loading bridges, and more. To maintain services and operate efficiently, the entire airport infrastructure must continue to function.
Data accessibility at all levels is essential for monitoring equipment and processes to ensure continuity of operations and the quality of service.
The Airport Internet of Things (IoT) is actually a subset of Industrial IoT, commonly known as IIoT. Just as many industrial organizations are creating digital twins of their equipment and infrastructure to enable improved operations, airports can also leverage their infrastructure data to enhance operations. The challenge is that connecting to equipment like elevators, escalators, conveyors, sortation systems, and boarding bridges can be difficult due to complex interfaces and low-level protocols.
The Solution
SMARTUNIFIER is a connectivity platform that enables the rapid development and deployment of structured, reusable interfaces, providing access to key data sources for applications to optimize airport operations.
A connectivity solution that enables fast, easy, and scalable integration of systems and infrastructure supports the movement towards the digitalization of airport processes.
With support for a variety of industrial communication protocols and formats out of the box, it is easy to connect these devices to any kind of on-premises or cloud-based target IT System, such as Asset Monitoring, Condition Monitoring and Maintenance Management, Energy Management, Asset Management, Operational Technology Service Management (OTSM), Capacity Planning and Management, Environmental Monitoring and Management, etc.
Solution Features
- Can be deployed on multiple platforms: on-premises, on the edge, in data centers, in the cloud.
- Virtually unlimited scalability through a fully decentralized architecture (Swarm) that can be centrally managed.
- Rapid real-time protocol conversion enables timely and reliable access to equipment data.
- Reusable and versioned interface models for similar equipment- or device types.
- Virtually unlimited number of communication connections, protocols, and information models (multi-channel capability).
- Configurable mapping minimizes connectivity coding.
- Development and deployment of connections can be completed in hours or days rather than weeks or months.
- Interface instances can be deployed, monitored, and managed from a central location using SMARTUNIFIER Manager.
Solution Benefits
- With a decentralized architecture, no large up-front investment is required to start implementing interfaces
- Rapid configuration and deployment of interfaces save time and money
- The benefits of upper-level applications are realized much sooner
