Airports powered by artificial intelligence are transforming our travel experiences. With continuous decision intelligence from real-time data, every passenger journey becomes more seamless, enjoyable, and predictable. AI enables an airport to effectively balance business goals or intents. An airport intends to sustain profitability while satisfying customers. AI can help manage the intent of every traveler to enjoy unique experiences.

Successful enterprise AI in airports is founded on sharing information from operational systems based on a common information model. Aligning data against a common ontology supports interoperability between applications and provides contextual metadata that is required for inference and decision making.

AI-powered Baggage Management can replace disparate and isolated airline enterprise applications and systems with a single solution to better handle smart baggage across the airline and aviation ecosystems. These real-time, inter-operable systems can reduce the instances of delayed, damaged and lost bags; track baggage location and weight changes to prevent theft and loss; and improve customer satisfaction through real-time status updates.

Rockport Software has significant experience designing and delivering AI solutions in airports, including machine learning algorithms to predict passenger behavior, assess the risk factors and probability that bags will miss their flights, optimizing baggage handling system processes and delivering event driven simulations of airport operations.

Rockport is participating in the Smart Airport Catalyst as part of the Digital Business Marketplace initiative by TM Forum. We have integrated the relevant components of the ACRIS Semantic Model with similar elements from TM Forum’s Information Framework within a digital twin of an airport to enable new services.

Bob Logan presented and demonstrated our airport digital twin at the Digital Transformation World conference and exhibition in Copenhagen.

The complex ecosystem of an airport is made up of assets, operations and processes each of which can be represented by a digital twin that represents the current state of each through synchronization with data feeds from airport applications. Representing the entire enterprise as a system of connected digital twins allows an airport to gain a holistic view of operations and insight into the interdependencies and utilization of each component. In this way, digital twins can represent the intents and capabilities of all airport stakeholders.

The data from digital twins can form the basis of an information source that artificial intelligence can be used to monitor, analyze and optimize performance.

PRESS RELEASE. Click here to view the TM Forum DTW Smart Airports - Enabling All Travelers to be VIPs press release.

Executing an effective asset optimization strategy has become central to survival in today’s competitive world. From design to predictive analytics, the use of digital twins is becoming more prevalent, where a twin is a digital representation of a real-world asset, process or system. The digital twin can reflect the current state of its real-world counterpart through distributed state management capabilities. Use digital twins to pro-actively repair equipment, plan manufacturing processes, predict equipment failure, and increase operational efficiency. Any asset coupled to IoT sensors can be modeled as a system to derive a digital twin for optimizing performance.

Rockport has developed an innovative 3D visualization tool that can be used create an immersive view of a digital twin, composing 3D objects in a dashboard to allow interaction with and navigation around the virtual environment. For example, an airport terminal digital twin model can be visualized to demonstrate physical-to-digital twin interaction, synchronizing assets and passenger movement with their physical counterparts.

Our approach is to establish a foundational common data platform to facilitate interoperability between digital twin systems whilst also supporting legacy systems and disparate data sources. This is a key component of our scalable and extensible reference architecture.

We model existing systems and processes based on the BEAM format. Modelling includes mapping the systems’ data schema to the common ontology, enabling the digital twins of these systems to be fully inter-operable. The models are referenced by our data transformation service to transform inbound data from these systems into the atomic event format coupled to the common ontology. This enables source data to be normalized to form the knowledge graph for real-time simulations and decision making. The models are also utilized for simulating behavior of existing systems.

Our patented event driven runtime provides a standard way to ingest event data to update the state of digital twins representing physical assets and systems. Data from multiple sources, with different levels of granularity, e.g. from applications or IOT devices, are transformed into the standard event-based message model.

Our development process includes defining outcome-based use cases and data models, discovery of relevant static and dynamic data sources, and assessment of data quality. The design stage is highly data driven and includes rapid prototyping and testing to compose the environment, ingest data, and execute scenarios to assess effectiveness of the model. The solution complies with aviation data standards and common technology standards such as REST APIs, RDF, JSON, and MQTT.

Airports are complex ecosystems comprising many stakeholders working together to deliver services to passengers. Airports must plan and coordinate activities with airlines and many other partners to ensure the operational capacity at any given time matches the expected passenger demand.

Every activity at an airport is planned based on a flight schedule and passenger number forecasts. Even minor variations in flight punctuality or actual passenger behavior as well as larger unexpected disruptions could lead to delays, costly operational inefficiencies and lower customer satisfaction. Globally, airports compete with each other for valuable business and strive to innovate to offer new valuable services to passengers as well as commercial partners.

Simulations provide airports with the capability to plan for short-, medium- and long-term expected demand as well as prepare for disruption events and assess future upgrades and innovations.

Rockport uses an innovative digital twin-to-digital twin interaction model as the basis for simulations. By using an existing airport digital twins, our simulation platform can leverage existing data feed investments to instantiate the baseline simulation of the airport. Using synthetic atomic events, the simulator generates realistic scenarios to test and optimize the virtual airport. The atomic events define the attributes of physical entities to dynamically compose a 3D visualization of the airport. Our simulation scenario platform allows facilities, assets, services and processes to be simulated based on their known state, capacities and behaviors.

The simulation model uses an innovative event based messaging approach (controlBEAM) that is aligned with a common aviation information model. This approach ensures interoperability with airport systems and supports a composable 3D visualization dashboard that is used to allow airports to verify simulation scenario outcomes.

The simulation model can be used to forecast passenger movement to support capacity planning under differing environmental, operational, and configuration conditions. Simulated experiences can be developed for business and leisure travelers moving from airport parking to flight boarding. By simulating service availability and usage at each stage of the journey, the airport can optimally route passengers to minimize wait times. An alternative view of the same scenario can be visualized to show the journey from a passenger's viewpoint, displaying timely service recommendations based on her intents and current situation.

Rockport is an active member of the Airports Council International (ACI) working group responsible for the definition of standards for information exchange, known as the ACRIS initiative (Airport Community Recommended Information Services).

Rockport have contributed to many ACRIS initiatives including significant involvement in the development of the ACI Semantic Model, using Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect.

Rockport has provided hosting services for the Semantic Model to support continuous collaborative development of the Semantic Model by airports around the world

Please contact Rockport to find out how to get involved with, and benefit from, these initiatives. If you would like to request access to the ACI Semantic Model, please contact us.

Rockport actively participates in the IATA/ACI Modern Messaging initiative (Baggage Information Exchange).

This initiative has developed a new standard for bag messaging that will revolutionize the world of Baggage Operations. The new standard, known as Recommended Practice 1755, built using the IATA AIDM (Airline Industry Data Model), will replace RP 1745 in due course. This will greatly facilitate the reduction in mis-connected bags. It will also support the new IATA Resolution 753 that requires airlines to provide certain mandatory information to passengers regarding the location of their bags.

Rockport Software can support your involvement with and adoption of the new bag messaging standard. We can offer a hosted broker service for organizations of any size.

Rockport Software hosted the ACI Semantic Model on behalf of Airports Council International (ACI) for a number of years.

The ACRIS Semantic Model was made available for online access for registered users in support of active ACRIS projects.

The change management process for the Semantic Model was administered using our JIRA helpdesk for registered users.

Rockport Software developed a Modern Messaging Baggage Testbed platform and hosted this on behalf of IATA.

The testbed provided a platform against which new implementations of airport/airline/vendor broker nodes could connect and conduct integration tests. The testbed was an scalable MQTT broker supporting the standard set of tests defined in the RP1755 Implementation Guide.

Rockport Software participated in the Fly2Plan project as part of a cross-industry consortium. The consortium, led by Heathrow Airport, included operational experts from airports, airlines and air traffic management, as well as technology and academic organisations.

Emerging and future models of airspace use, for example drones and unmanned air taxis arriving and departing from an airport, and from many other locations, will require a dramatic increase in the sharing and exchage of aviation information and may require new information models and standards. The Fly2Plan project looked to support future information exchange requirements of UK airspace by building a blockchain-based system to facilitate the trusted exchange of aviation information in a secure and scalable manner.

The Airports Council International (ACI) ACRIS Semantic Model provided a consistent and integrated view of airports and the wider aviation ecosystem and was ideally placed to support this project for the demanding requirements of current and future airspace operators.

AirportShare was an Airports Council International (ACI World) initiative to provide a single central platform for airports to publish data of interest to the aviation community in a standardised way, and for consumers to have easy access to that data worldwide.

Passengers are becoming more tech-savvy and information hungry. They expect to have accurate information directly relevant to their circumstances at their fingertips. Aviation service providers want to improve the value of their existing services and introduce new business models to provide innovative services. Whether hub or spoke, airports operate in huge network of connected organisations, often worldwide. The exchange of high-quality information is vital to the success of the participants in this ecosystem. AirportShare was envisioned to provide the means for airports to share the data to a worldwide audience for the benefit of the passenger.

Following a public RFP in 2023, Rockport Software was selected and awarded the sole contract to develop a fully operational pilot platform for AirportShare.

Over a three month period, Rockport developed and deployed an enterprise scale API platform and integrated data connections with a cohort of early adopter international ariports from around the world. The API platform provided a system by which third party data consumer organizations were able to register in a secure manner to access the airport data via standard APIs conforming to best practices including compliance with the ACI ACRIS Semantic Model.