Greatest challenges for airports
For many years, one of the most significant challenges for airports has been accessing reliable data to support operations decision-making. Data has existed in silos and data from different sources has not always been consistent. Progress has been made to reduce silos and improve data sharing, but there is still a wealth of valuable data that airport operations management does not have access to. This includes data on the status and performance of essential airport infrastructure, environmental conditions, energy and water consumption, mobile equipment location, and many others. Such data can be considered part of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and like many other industries, the airport industry can benefit from the harvesting of this data.
Several use cases exist for integrating Operational Technology (OT) with Information Technology (IT). Some examples are illustrated in the diagram below.
The diagram illustrates the various protocols that can be present and must be converted to enable OT/IT integration. Fortunately, there is an ideal solution for connecting systems and converting protocols known as SMARTUNIFIER.
SMARTUNIFIER is a connectivity platform that facilitates the rapid development of airport operations interfaces, which are structured and reusable. This allows airports to receive data from key sources in real time, which then enables them to optimize their operations.
- SMARTUNIFIER can be deployed on-premises or within edge devices, providing connectivity wherever needed.
- The configuration and deployment of the communication instances within the SMARTUNIFIER system can be completely managed from cloud services if required.
- Low-level data is abstracted and provided in a unified information model,
- Different upper-level systems to access data according to pre-defined models using multiple parallel communication channels that provide views such as:
- Control view (Equipment Monitoring and Control, Tracking & Tracing)
- Maintenance view (Condition Monitoring)
- Analytics view (Performance Management)
- Quality view (Preventive & Predictive Quality)
- Energy view (Energy Consumption)
- Data storage and archiving view (Data Lakes)
- Further, use case-dependent views
- Scalable network-oriented architecture, that can evolve in a structured way to an Enterprise Nervous System (ENS) for airport-wide, or multi-airport connectivity.
Migration to ACRIS standards
To facilitate communication between airports, airlines, partners, and suppliers, ACI has established a framework for standards for information and data exchange.
The ACI Aviation Community Recommended Information Services, or ACRIS, defines a connectivity solution that enables fast, easy integration of systems and infrastructure.
At the same time, ACRIS standards can be introduced for standardized information exchange with other systems and stakeholders. The ACRIS data models for information exchange can be imported into SMARTUNIFIER Information Models and then mapped to data models for anything from low-level equipment to legacy systems.
This provides an ideal platform for migration to ACRIS standards as illustrated in the migration path diagram.
SMARTUNIFIER Advantages
- Can be deployed on multiple platforms, on-premises, on the edge, in data centers, and in the cloud.
- Virtually unlimited scalability through fully decentralized architecture (Swarm) that can be centrally managed.
- Rapid real-time protocol conversion enables timely and reliable access to high-speed production data.
- Reusable and versioned interface models for similar equipment- or device types.
- Virtually unlimited amount of communication connections, protocols, and information models (multi-channel capability).
- Configurable mapping means connectivity coding is minimized.
- Development and deployment of connections can be completed in hours or days instead of weeks and months.
Visit our website to learn more about SMARTUNIFIER!
