Passenger Flow a Top Priority for PTE Attendees
People are traveling again, in a big way—a message that came through loud and clear at the 2024 edition of the Passenger Terminal Expo (PTE).
After some years of uncertainty and suppressed passenger volumes, airports are back to contending with challenges related to passenger flow. Airport operators speaking with Xovis at PTE in Frankfurt, were, well, frank in their assessment of resource constraints and concern about the accuracy and lifecycle of emerging passenger flow management solutions.
“Passenger flow management used to be a niche topic, mainly for airports with limited space and grown structures. Today, passenger flow measurement in terminal management is a key tool because guiding a passenger from curb-to-gate is a core process. It’s a core process because this journey is really important,” Christian Studer, Xovis co-founder and CEO, said.
Simplifying passenger flow complexity
The effectiveness of a passenger flow management solution hinges on its ability to accurately track passengers in different queuing environments, regardless of complexity. And accuracy is the main concern for all data-driven terminal operators.
Rising passenger numbers tend to increase the complexity of queuing environments in airports. That’s one of the reasons Xovis was so excited to unveil AERO Queue Detection at PTE.
Already a market leader in managing curb-to-gate passenger flows, AERO Queue Detection raises the bar for effectively managing all queue types—from most to least complex.
“We’ve been investing a lot of time and effort over the past couple of years on AERO, our fully managed service, which introduces multiple features so we can have this KPI output with minimal maintenance and minimal manual intervention,” Florian Eggenschwiler, Xovis CPO, said. “And AERO Queue Detection, built from scratch, is our machine learning-based queue recognition tool that self-adjusts and self-learns to terminal or layout changes, as they inevitably do. It’s another feature that ensure that KPI output is accurate.”
Developed using advanced machine learning techniques, the cloud-native queue recognition algorithm relieves operators from manually monitoring changing queueing environments. With AERO Queue Detection, operators don’t have to commit time and resources to updating the system, it’s completely automated.
AERO Queue Detection, a feature of Xovis’ recently released fully managed service, helps airport operators streamline mission-critical processes without increasing staffing costs—a goal of many airports, big and small.
A solution for now and later
Passenger numbers are expected to surpass pre-pandemic levels in 2024 and forecast to reach almost 19 billion by 2040, according to some industry estimates. The projections mean that a selected passenger flow management solution must be robust enough to meet demand in a few months and the coming decades.
Not all airport queues are created equal, and neither are the solutions intended to address them. Xovis may have been helping more than 110 of the world’s busiest and best airports solve short and long-term passenger flow challenges but the company is not alone—except in its ability to accurately detect all queue complexity levels.
PTE was a great opportunity to see other technologies that are being used by some airports to improve passenger flow. Advances in the industry have been impressive, and we had some excellent talks with passenger experience professionals about what accuracy level is needed and the operational life of underlying technology.
“There was a bit of urgency in some of the talks during PTE, which we like because the Xovis system is easy to install, but operators want a passenger flow management solution for today and 20 years from now. Some solutions on the market have to be replaced in a matter of years, that is, or at least should be, a major concern for airports,” Rui Ferreira, Xovis Director of Customer Success Airports, cautioned.
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Tags: | Xovis | PTE | airport | fair | passenger flow measurement | aviation |
