Totally optimised: inside GTAA and SITA’s stand planning module proof of concept

Over the past decade, airports have done a great job of optimising individual functions, but few of these synchronise well. This can often lead to teams, systems, procedures, and KPIs conflicting with each other, creating operational inefficiencies that can lose airports millions in potential revenue each year.

Another issue faced by airport operations centres (APOCs) is that many of the management systems currently used often have a static configuration. APOC staff take many things into account when making decisions, from safety and operational performance through to passenger experience, but these static configurations prevent them from dynamically adapting their plans in response to changes in the airport’s environment or priorities.

“Imagine you are in an APOC; all your tools are configured to support a normal busy day, but now the weather has totally changed your priorities. Your team needs a quick way to build, evaluate and deploy a new plan to match the new situation. Static rules will never allow that,” points out a SITA spokesperson.

Demand for more holistic solutions is understandably growing, as organisations look at how they can use technology to better improve operations.

Last year, the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) kicked off a digitalisation initiative to look at how it could use data and advanced analytics to drive better insights in its operation and planning processes.

“Take stand planning,” says Joey MacSween, programme director of data and analytics at GTAA. “It’s been around forever, and with the technology landscape today, there’s a lot of opportunity to integrate what would have been considered unrelated data into stand planning at more of an enterprise level.

“It’s certainly an operations function, but analytics have shown us that it can impact so many metrics and KPIs. This includes commercial spend – depending on where you place an aircraft will influence where passengers eat or shop, helping passengers make connections by gating them closer to their previous flight rather than at the very end of a pier or a satellite, and we can even lower CO₂ emissions. This can be achieved by shortening the worst emitting aircrafts’ taxi times.” 

As part of its digitisation project, GTAA worked with SITA on a digital twin proof of concept (PoC), which is how it heard about the tech company’s plans to develop its 'Airport Operations Total Optimizer’. This is a tool that harnesses AI and the principles of total airport management to optimise holistically across a variety of airport functions.

“The SITA Total Optimizer service (patents pending) interacts with a host of airport systems that are airside, landside and external to the airport,” says SITA’s spokesperson. “The data can be ingested from SITA systems or from other providers. This information is then assimilated into an AI-powered platform that recommends ways to operate the airport more efficiently.

“The service continually learns from experience rather than being manually adapted, and customers have the option to select various modules to incorporate different airport functions into a holistic optimisation,” the spokesperson add. 

MacSween was eager to see how this solution could impact stand planning for the authority, and so partnered with the tech company to deploy a prototype of the Total Optimizer stand planning function.

This was integrated with historical data from a number of different GTAA sources including commercial, emissions, passenger flow, and on time performance. 

“It helped us to use this historical data in a very streamlined way and present a front-end dashboard that allowed an operator to simulate plans for specific dates. This became extremely attractive to us, as we could look at how top level KPIs would be impacted just by moving a flight from one stand to another,” says MacSween. 

“First, we looked back at how well we did on our KPIs based on the stand plan we had originally generated for a specific day. Using the data the planner would have had at that time, we then asked ‘Total Optimizer to create a stand plan based on the same predictions and priorities and measured how the KPIs were affected. 

“The results were very promising,” MacSween continues. “For example, one of the KPIs we were measuring was predicted gate hold time for arrival aircraft, and it predicted an average of 37% reduction in gate hold minutes, which is very important to us.”  

To deliver a solution that could provide the most beneficial holistic stand plans for GTAA, SITA spent time with the team there to fully understand their environment and ways of working, the data that they had available and their KPIs.  

“This collaboration really helps us to focus the optimisations to the KPIs that mattered the most to GTAA stakeholders. They also provided us with constructive feedback that allows us to build an intuitive user interface suitable for an operational environment,” says the SITA spokesperson. 

“Using the example of stand planning, our PoC confirmed that the principles of this service are sound and bring great value.”

The two organisations are now discussing ideas around a second PoC or potentially what a production launch would look like.

“We’re very encouraged and we’re ready to go do more,” says MacSween. “I guess that would really be more of a pilot, as the next logical step is to use the tool to build the advance stand plans.”

The technology is there, he says, but the biggest challenge is around bringing staff along on this journey.

“It’s a big shift to say to our current stand planners – guys that have been doing this for 20 years and have an incredible amount of knowledge – that we’re bringing in a tool that will do this task for them and all they’ll need to do is check it.

“The technology is almost the easy part; it’s about understanding how the stakeholder community is going to respond and to make sure we’re ready to fully embrace and adopt the technology.” 

SITA is also in a number of “mature” discussions with many airports in all regions, some of which are considering the adoption of its wider product roadmap. 

“We’ll continue to develop the product with the guidance of this community,” SITA’s spokesperson concludes.