Analytics helping ‘smart’ Sydney Airport get off the ground

Sydney Airport – the main international gateway to Australia and the country’s busiest airport – is already claiming progress on its efforts to become a ‘smart airport’ after using IBM statistical and business tools to create new analytical models that combine data from a bevy of siloed information systems.

The push to improve information about the operations of the airport – used by over 37 million passengers per year, or 100,000 per day, on nearly 300,000 plane movements per year – came after business executives began expressing frustration at how long it took to get monthly reports on the airport’s passenger and other activities.

That information is crucial to planning the airport’s service capacity, resource distribution and more – but because of the nature of its operations the data had traditionally been stored across a range of systems, many owned by the 39 airlines using the airport and other commercial entities.

Because of the large and varied nature of the data that had to be compiled, reports typically took two business weeks to complete using conventional methods built around Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

SOURCE: zdnet.com