Agile at the Hamburg Airport

More and more delays in the daily flight schedule make it very difficult for ground handling service providers at airports to manage the complete turnaround with sometimes only 25 minutes of aircraft downtime on the ground. With the ADIL project "Automated Dispatching with Integrated Control Center", WPS Workplace Solutions consistently implemented this vision so that all services are centrally controlled in an automated manner from the perspective of a flight event and no longer - as is still common in many places today - manually from the respective perspective of the buses, tugs or baggage drivers.

Analog becomes digital

This new automated dispatch software should shift dispatcher interaction to resolving a few conflicts. Previously, manual assignment of a flight event to the responsible team and the appropriate equipment was the norm. Real time information on the dispatch status on the apron should help in the future to make decisions in the control center in exceptional situations. In standard procedures, radio communication between dispatchers in the control center should be completely eliminated. With the full support of the new server processes by mobile devices, the necessary documentation of processes and results should completely switch to a digital and thus paperless format. A holistic view of the cross-trade status of dispatching at a glance should become possible for the control center.

Success with microservice architecture

For many years, the IT support for ground handling services (BVD) at Hamburg Airport consisted of a historically grown structure that had already undergone modernization in individual areas. Although order assignment via Android tablets was introduced in isolated cases, the majority of communication was still paper-based. The goal of commissioning WPS Workplace Solutions was to transfer all dispatching applications to a new, mobile-capable technology stack and to take into account new and changing requirements in the development process.The applications to be developed for this purpose were to be implemented as independent microservices. In addition, data from various legacy applications will be fed into the data management layer to enable a comprehensive analysis of the existing parameters. The final data evaluation is then performed by a separate BI system.ADIL Product Owner Lutz Tilgner summarizes the added value of the new software for Hamburg Airport as follows: With ADIL, our employees in the operations centers are transformed from silo dispatchers to 360-degree bottleneck managers. The clearly structured and intuitive user interface has helped our teams to avoid any fear of contact with the new technology.