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Eyes From The Sky
Automatic Equipment Tracking at Hong Kong International Airport

There are always problems with locating thousands of mobile equipment, including tractors, dollies, mobile loading equipment and patrol vans, on airport ramps. To maximize equipment utilization, the largest ramp handler in Hong Kong International Airport has moved to the leading edge of Global Positioning System (GPS) technology to retrieve and employ its idle ramp handling equipment. The solution combines GPS, RFID, and wireless communication to track status of Ground Support Equipment (GSE) in near real-time. This application will greatly save the Company's budget on new equipment. Moreover the equipment location information is very useful for decision-making of pooling equipment with other airport operators. Other application potentials are monitoring of speeding and driving in restricted areas.

The Ramp Handling Operations

The ramp handling company serves over 250 flights daily with approximately 1,500 staff, hundreds of powered GSE and thousands of non-powered dollies.

When aircrafts arrive in Hong Kong, it provides the following ramp handling services:

Loading/unloading of baggage, cargo and mail by mobile loading equipment
Aerobridge and mobile passenger stair operations
Mail, cargo and baggage delivery by tractors and dollies
Passenger shuttle between remote parking bay and Passenger Terminal by passenger buses

Challenges

On-time performance is the second most important issue after safety for the commercial air transport industry. As the largest ramp handling agent in Hong Kong International Airport, she has to commit a very stringent service standard on baggage, cargo and mail delivery to its aircraft handling service. The high volume of flight traffic and wide area of the ramp (1,248 hectare) create a very high demand on GSE and container dollies to transport baggage, cargo and mail, especially in peak hours. It is a particularly inefficient task to try to find empty dollies during peak hours. It is never known if a certain level of equipment is sufficient or not. Even worse, it is practically never known exactly what the actual count of dollies is that are moving around the airport round-the-clock, and many of them are 'borrowed' by other airport operators.

Eyes From The Sky

To meet the challenges, Epcode developed a GPS and RFID hybrid system to track all the GSE. The initial thought was to locate each GSE and dolly by GPS combined with RF transmitters. It is, however, not practical for a container dolly which has neither power nor enough protection from physical damage of active electronic devices. Instead of installing a GPS plus RF transmitter on each GSE, a rugged passive RFID tag is permanently mounted on the metal structure of equipment for its identification - a kind of electronic license plate. As it is a passive device, maintainability is not an issue. The most significant benefit of this design is its low capital investment.

RFID readers are installed in a few patrol vans which can detect a RFID tag within 30 meters. GPS receivers are installed in these patrol vans. The tagged GSE are detected by the patrol van when they are within reading range during the route. The real-time location information of the patrol van and the identification of the dolly will then be transmitted to the server wirelessly. With graphical display of a digitized map of the ramp area and equipment searching capability, ramp supervisors can effectively identify the location of each equipment and assign task to idle ones.

Value Propositions

  1. Improve utilization of dollies and other GSE
    All idle equipment will be identified immediately for the next assignment. It can reduce the budget for new dollies which costs about USD 4,000 each.
  2. Provide information to make decision on pooling equipment with other airport operators
    There is always an argument on the advantage to share equipment with other airport operators. With usage data of the equipment, the ramp handler can determine exactly know how many equipment units are idle at what time. Moreover, during equipment pooling the statistics serves as a very important base on justifying the cost sharing of the equipment among partners.
  3. Provide equipment movement statistics
    Equipment movement can be replayed for the design of further route planning.
  4. Retrieving 'borrowed' dollies
    亟yes from the sky?will dig out any dollies being borrowed by other airport operators without permission. Utilization of dollies can be improved.
  5. Restricted Area Management
    The system allows the Control Room to monitor any unauthorized access to restricted areas, especially the aircraft taxiway. Proactive alerts to drivers can effectively prevent fatal incidents.
  6. Speeding control
    Speeding can also be traced by the GPS position and time information. All violations can be identified immediately, preventing penalties.

Conclusion

GPS and RFID are practical technologies, in terms of cost and technical stability, in automatic equipment identification and tracking. The 前yes from the sky?can provide invaluable information to corporate resource planning and real time resource assignment. The most important advantage is in the application design and the method to process the vast amount of data. A related future application is under serious debate in the industry: should the 'eyes' also be watching individuals?