SITA released a new white paper, Total Airport Management, in March this year which outlines why optimising individual processes is no longer enough and how airports can unlock hidden capacity by aligning operational decisions in real time.
It also looks at how growth does not automatically create congestion and that when coordination improves, performance follows. Airports that align their operations in real time can protect capacity, reduce bottlenecks and deliver smoother journeys. The insight in the report unlocks earlier disruption management, stronger on-time performance, and more efficient use of existing infrastructure by connecting data, teams, and partners across the airport ecosystem, and applying predictive analytics and optimisation.
To learn more about this, Regional Gateway met up with Nick Batchelor, Vice President of Innovation, Apps & Data at SITA at PTE World expo which was held at the ExCel London on 17-19 March.
Batchelor spent 13 years at Gatwick Airport as Head of IT before joining SITA. He says being at Gatwick immersed him in a very busy international airport environment, providing a fantastic education in how to make a quite a compressed and busy airport work operationally.
“That was a really good education in how a combination of technology and processes are needed to optimise the flow of people, bags and planes through a very constrained airport infrastructure. So what I’m doing at SITA is bringing that airport knowledge about how to solve and how technology can solve real world business and airport problems, and bring that into the product development side.”
Batchelor says the aim is to develop technology that allows airports to address the issues of capacity and minimising disruption, as well as improving operational efficiency and cost effectiveness.
“The starting point of SITA’s Total Airport Management philosophy is how do we treat the entire airport as a single ecosystem? And how DO we bring all the partners together so everybody is operating off a single view of operational data and that we can unify the decision making process across multiple stakeholders.”
He notes this is a bold ambition, so how do we bring it together? To find out, SITA’s report can be downloaded from here.
