Published on the 27/03/2017 | Written by Donovan Jackson

Melbourne Airport smartens up with integration and intelligence…

As it gets its Singapore version of its NOW conference underway, middleware and analytics vendor TIBCO said Melbourne Airport has bought into its vision to interconnect everything and augment intelligence. The airport, apparently challenged with a silo-based heterogenous environment, is seeking to combine events and information to enhance operational performance.

The covers were lifted on TIBCO’s vision at last year’s NOW conference in Las Vegas. The idea, for the company which is synonymous with application integration, is to leverage the power of interconnectedness and combine it with ‘augmented’ rather than strictly artificial intelligence.

Melbourne Airport has introduced TIBCO’s API-based ActiveWorx BusinessWorks Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and business rules platform, StreamBase streaming analytics software and Live Datamart. The system was provided by TIBCO partner Nukon.

In a statement, the software company said the result for Melbourne Airport is a Situation Awareness Platform (we know a vendor which might lay claim to the resulting acronym) which ties together distributed systems to provide various individuals throughout the facility with real-time information. That information is used to support collaborative decision-making, resource-planning, and incident identification.

The users of the system include airport service operators, planners, managers, and external providers.

“The system has established a strong foundation for the continuing integration of information and operational technologies allowing proactive, and in the future, predictive operations, in line with our vision of being a ‘smart’ airport,” said Vic Raymond, ICT manager at the airport.

ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks connects cloud and on premise applications and in the airport’s case, is used to adapt data from external systems. Live Datamart, meanwhile, provides push-based analytics to analyse, anticipate, and alert on business events in real time. That equips personnel to act on opportunities or threats as they occur. The data is provided as a live visual representation of the airport in a web application.

Future plans include the mooted introduction of TIBCO’s Spotfire analytics for predictive ad-hoc investigations.

The overall solution, said TIBCO’s statement, provides a real-time geospatial mash-up of data streams in a fully interactive map on any device. Data can be correlated in a single web-based, real-time dashboard for operational status while data mining enables Melbourne Airport to represent, trend, predict, and resource accurately and automatically in real time.

“We now have the technology to have a visual overview of real-time operational activities which are occurring at the airport,” said Raymond.

More than 34 million passengers travel through Melbourne Airport annually, with this number expected to increase to around 64 million by 2033.

Donovan Jackson attended TIBCO NOW as a guest of TIBCO.