“The AODB as we know it is dead” – AIRHART CSO

Martin Bowman, chief strategy officer at Smarter Airports, speaks to Airport Industry Review to give an update on its proprietary AIRHART system, a year after we visited its first application in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Netcompany developed the multifactor tool to manage airport operations with its local partner, Copenhagen Airport, in 2023.

The appointment of a new strategy leader seems an opportune moment to catch up with the tech company that is giving airports a chance to see another way of operating, as Bowman describes it.

Martin Bowman: I like to think of it as a next generation in airport orchestration and airport operations. It originated from the traditional tools used to operate an airport. But what it doesn’t have is any of the restrictions, the limitations, or any of the boundaries of those traditional systems.

So, from a business capability point of view, it does the stuff that traditional systems would. It doesn’t do [it] with any of the same barriers or ‘start, middle, ends’ – it’s much more extendable. It’s much more holistic, a much more strategic approach to delivering operational technology at an airport. And that’s part of the challenge. The challenge that we have is essentially with a new category. We’re a new way of working, a new way of doing things. And I think that’s what has happened in the last 12 months… we have moved. Obviously, our origins are in what we’ve been doing with Copenhagen Airport.

But we’ve broadened beyond Copenhagen. We obviously continue to work extensively with Copenhagen, but we’ve broadened, and have got the first mixed major airport that has embraced this kind of new way of working and has embraced it as a platform

MB: They haven’t gone down the route of labelling the platform and putting it into a specific capability or a specific category. They’ve said: "No, this is operational transformation. This is the digital transformation of the operation. We’re not going to put the boundaries on this. We’re going to have things that we’re hoping to do. We’re going to have plans that we’re hoping to execute against."

But this is basically something that is limited [only] by our imagination. You know, we can extend this and take this much, much further. So that’s massively encouraging. And I think it’s given us confidence to be brave and basically say that this isn’t your traditional system. This isn’t your traditional way of doing this. This is a new generation, but this is a new way of doing it. This is a new capability, a new category in technology. And I think that’s what you’ll see going forward with us.

MB: I don’t want to kind of hex us or anything, but there are a couple of others that are moving towards that conclusion. And again, because of the type of organisations that they are, it gives us confidence that this is starting to become something that’s recognised by major airports. They want the flexibility that a platform-based approach gives them.

MB: If you look at where we are seeing momentum, I wouldn’t say it’s coincidental, the momentum within the European market and Netcompany being a major European technology company…  the synergies are there. But what we also see is that there is a recognition that the European airports, in particular, are feeling the capacity crunch, probably more than most others.

The latest forecast figures from Eurocontrol up to 2050 show that the number of capacity-constrained airports is expected to increase quite significantly. So airports are actually looking to not just build infrastructure out of some of their operational challenges, [they are] looking at smarter infrastructure asset optimisation – intelligent decision making.

It doesn’t surprise me that the European market is picking up on this first. Being a European organisation does help. There’s probably a recency and a kind of relevance to what we’re doing that helps with that.

We’ve seen this in aviation, and over the last 15-20 years, there have been a lot of initiatives that were born out of Europe… people have realised it’s a good concept and therefore, it doesn’t have boundaries. Airport Collaborative Decision Making (ACDM) is a great example of that. ACDM was all born out of the European SESAR research. But how many ACDM airports are there in the world now? They’re not just European, it’s all across the world. So, I would hope that over time we will be expanding.

MB: The main strategic thrust over the next 12 months will be embedding the concept of an ‘operations orchestration platform’ into the general vernacular of the industry. That will be what we are focusing on, getting the industry to recognise that there is an alternative to the traditional systems.

One of the things that I talk about is calling AIRHART an ‘airport operations orchestration platform’. So it’s an AOOP, right? The way I talk about that, it’s like the Airport Operational Database (AODB) as we know it is dead, right? That’s the old way of doing it. That is the old kind of historical way we do it. This way is the AOOP.

So the strategy is to educate the market that there is a new alternative to the traditional systems and approach that they had.

MB: I think the thing that we strongly believe in is that the airports are an ecosystem. Both in terms of the people – the kind of functional people that operate at the airport – but also in terms of the technologies that support the operation of the airport.

One of the things that we’ve been doing the last 12 months at Copenhagen has been working with one of the vendors that is applying AI to a particular problem, where there are two use cases. There’s one around operational efficiency and turnaround efficiency, and then there’s another one around sustainability and emission reductions. So, that partner system, that expert system, is off doing its bit, and it’s off gathering its insights.

But what is then happening is that as the insights are becoming available, AIRHART is then triggering the wider management system, shall we say, triggering the wider organisation and using its orchestration ability to then trigger changes and process and make sure that the insights are being actioned.

I think it’s been a major step forward in the last 12 months, because I’m firmly of the belief that there isn’t a ‘silver bullet’ solution. This isn’t a singular technology that delivers positive change, it requires the ecosystem to work in collaboration. It requires the vendors to work in collaboration. We embrace that, and I would expect to see us continuing that going forward.

MB: I was already aware of Smarter Airports, because I’m an industry guy, so I obviously track the industry and know what’s going on. But I properly encountered it, and it was like direct, first-hand encountering, just on some work I was doing for a couple of major airports. The more I learned about it, the more I thought: "Oh, I quite like the sound of this."

I was actually a bit of a cynic at first. I had a colleague who had joined Deloitte from Netcompany, and he was talking to me about it. I was in cynic-mode, and I’m saying: "Well, it’s an AODB, right? It’s an AODB. How can it be that revolutionary? It manages flight data, manages the aircraft data. It does Master Data Management. It does notifications, so just an AODB, right?"

And he kept saying to me: "I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s different."

So, when I was doing this work for this other airport, I got quite close to it, and I was getting quite granular around some of the stuff I was asking. Every answer that I got made it clear that it was flexible, and it was clear that there was way more power under the hood than I’d ever assumed.

And then to cut a long story short, I was at a wee bit of a crossroads myself. I had some options to go down different routes, and I decided that I probably wanted to get back closer to the industry. Because when you do strategy work, it’s very, very satisfying. You’re at the heart of the idea process. And really doing all the thinking. But the problem when you do strategy work is you don’t stick around to see the change, you don’t stick around to see what happens.

And, off the back of that, I wanted to do the ‘do’, it was not just enough to do the ‘think’. What flipped the switch for me was the motivation to change the industry approach, and the ability to get the industry to recognise that there is an alternative to the way you’ve done things historically.

MB: I think on the macro level, success is the industry recognising and adopting the new approach to operational technology and operational orchestration, and whether it be us or others that might subsequently follow, anything that unlocks the legacy is just such a positive step forward.  

At the micro level, I really do think we are primed for digitally enabling larger, more complex airports. There are a couple of organisations in particular that I think we are ideally suited for. So if we could progress against those, that would be great. Total Airport Management (TAM) has bounced around for years, and it’s never really gathered momentum, but it’s not that the concept itself is flawed.

What it is, is that the technology to actually enable it hasn’t been available for such a long time, because you can’t enable TAM if all your estate is covered in legacy [technology]. I would love to see if we could see TAM having a new breath of life. And for people to say: "We can actually do this now. This isn’t some sort of academic concept over there. We can actually do this now."

And if AIRHART and Smarter Airports can be at the heart of TAM coming back into fashion and genuinely delivering value, I would be delighted. I would be so proud of that.