Case Study: Birmingham Airport

Seamless Integration is the key to a successful Flight Information System.

Airports are looking for integrated solutions to the management and display of flight information. Good performance and resilience are demanded for what is usually a business-critical system, whilst flexibility is also a vital ingredient to meet diverse and changing operational needs. Scalability for growth, connectivity and future support are also key issues, so the right approach in terms of platform and architecture is essential.

Epitomising this approach, ACIS' airport-wide system called AXIS is an industry-leading example of the virtues of an Open System combined with highly integrated functionality on a modern platform.

The AXIS system seamlessly integrates with an Airport Operational Database and brings together applications for flight schedule management, movements planning, reporting and billing.

Birmingham International (BHX) today

Perfectly placed in the heart of the West Midlands and close to major motorway network, BHX is a premier league airport. Its two-terminals boast modern facilities servicing 50 airlines going to 100 destinations.
The ACIS system, is servicing the airport today across its two terminals supporting:

9 million passengers annually
100 destinations served
90 check-in desks
70 boarding gates
110,000 air transport movements

The impact of the ACIS system is immediately visible as you enter the departure terminals where each of the 100 check-in desks is equipped with large, flat panel LCD displays with flight data on open desks and dynamic, eye-catching advertising images.
Behind the scenes the extensive system has a presence on 100 staff desks through the Intranet facility.
The central system, comprising a duplex pair of high performance servers provides non-stop operation for this mission critical system.
BHX has implemented the majority of the available AXIS modules which are seamlessly integrated an are an integral port of the airport's IT infrastructure.

AODB (airport operational database)
Passenger FIDS with over 400 client displays
Staff intranet with over 100 workstations

Client software applications throughout all operational areas:

In airline and agent offices where flight schedules are managed
At the information desk where passenger information status is managed
In the baggage hall where latest bag arrival and baggage status is managed
On the apron where flight arrivals, baggage and other equipment are managed
At every one of the 100 check-in desks where check-in information is displayed and staff have access to latest flights status.

The system has the following integration:

Direct links to British Airways flights management system
Connection to the Internet for direct, electronic publishing of flight information on the airport web-site
Connection to the airport resource management system for stand planning activities
Data links to the airport accounting system both to provide flight movement and load data for revenue collection and for publishing flights data to the CAA data unit.
Intelligent modules for many aspects of automation including rule-based flight linking between in-bound and out-bound aircraft, departure progress and others.

The system has automated publishing of flight information on the BBC CEEFAX service.

Technical Partnership

The 'openness' of systems is not just a technology issue, its also defines a philosophical approach in which access to the database is provided to the customers highly skilled IT engineering staff who are able to define many aspects of the systems behaviour and functionality. This climate of partnership and trust has ensured that whilst both System and airport have expanded steadily over the last ten years the customer has confidence, based on over 10 years of experience, that his ACIS solution has the flexibility and scalability to keep pace with airport growth and that he can continue to enjoy its truly excellent reliability record and its feature-rich user applications.