Veovo has launched its Live Passenger Forecasting system, which it says will prevent airport overcrowding, improve capacity planning and boost operational efficiency. Keflavík Airport (KEF) is the first to adopt the solution, helping it reduce the impact of recent travel volatility and support new distancing initiatives.
Veovo states that as flights begin to resume globally, the ability for airports to cope with air travel fluctuations and new processes will be imperative to minimize crowding and ensure smooth journeys, while operating under significant budgetary constraints.
It explains that the system has been designed to reduce uncertainty around planning, enabling airports to handle unforeseen events. To achieve this, it draws data from any available sources, including various sensor technologies, airline schedules and booking files, the Airport Operational Database (AODB), queue wait times and lane productivity, event calendar and boarding pass scans. From this, it builds an accurate by-flight forecast of how passengers will arrive and transit through the terminal. The airport can then build a robust resourcing plan to match demand.
“During this Covid-19 period, new air traffic patterns and changing passenger behavior means that we can no longer depend on plans based only on historical show-up patterns,” said Thordis Bjornsdottir (left), specialist in operation research at Isavia, Iceland’s national airport provider. “Veovo’s new live re-forecasting capabilities provide us with an early heads-up on changes to passenger presentation profiles. This allows us to easily adapt plans and rosters to reflect the current situation, improving journeys and keeping costs down.”
The solution continually re-forecasts, based on live data, and alerts the operator immediately when predetermined thresholds are reached. Veovo says resourcing and operational actions are recommended to minimize bottlenecks and prevent crowding, such as by adjusting call-to-gate time, changing border control lane openings or reallocating baggage belts. Insights are also provided to help operators understand the cause of the deviation from the plan, which could be anything from a late arrival, to a slower-than-predicted security process. This insight is then fed back into the future plan to continually improve the forecast accuracy, based on local conditions.
The new system is part of Veovo’s Airport Intelligent Platform and can, says the company, be customized to accommodate an airport’s access to data and planning needs and does not require any specialized skills to use. Additionally, via a configurable, visual dashboard, airport partners such as security, border control agencies and retailers can be kept informed as to when passengers will show up, and any subsequent impacts on operational areas.
