A Smart Digital Platform for Airport Services Improving Passenger Satisfaction

Airport management companies are facing increasing passenger numbers and the pressure to provide high-quality ground services to satisfy the passengers' needs and expectations. A new kind of information system is required, monitoring passenger figures in real time to estimate the time and location when and where a service must be provided and responsible staff scheduled. We suggest an event processing platform which is built upon an industry-proven technology and aggregates streams of information about passenger frequency occurring in heterogeneous formats and with different frequencies to a key performance indicator reflecting the current state of selected areas at the airport. Following the design research principle, we conducted a requirements analysis and developed a prototypical system which efficiently fuses the data streams and generates alerts to notify staff if passenger satisfaction threatens to drop. The system was evaluated with historical data from one of the 20 largest airports in Europe. The evaluation is based on a simulation and provides evidence that the system has the potential to improve customer satisfaction. In addition, due to the event-based architecture, a generic API allows a smooth integration of new data sources, the parametrization of the event rules aggregating and processing all data, and thus, an intuitive usage by the airport operator. The final tool consists of the event processing module and a dashboard supporting airport managers in keeping track of the important quality attribute passenger satisfaction and scheduling staff in the right spot at the right time.