The management of limited assets is crucial for the maximum effectiveness of airport operations. Ranging from passenger transportation via buses, baggage management equipment, pushback and aircraft cleaning operations, a ground handling suite (GHS) can help improve airport operations and make them more efficient.
An effective GHS aims to help improve passenger service levels and enables airports to use their resources more efficiently by optimising the planning and assignment of airport resources and equipment.
The TAV Technologies’ GHS offers a flexible, reliable and scalable solution for ground-handling operations at airports worldwide, ranging from local and small-scale facilities to major hubs that serve as base airports for large international airlines.
Functionalities of a ground handling system/suite in airports
According to TAV Technologies: “Managing staff, equipment, and resources in an airport are one of the most difficult jobs in the world. They should be ready regardless of delays or unpredictable difficult situations to meet service agreements and operational requirements.”
By enabling real-time operational, ad-hoc, and break task planning, TAV Technologies’ GHS can optimise airport operations and personnel management depending on the season.
The GHS supports capacity and resource demand calculations based on flight schedules, as well as provides real-time allocation of ground handling operations to enhance task management.
It also creates shift plans and automated staff rosters based on regulations and shift/rostering rules of the organisation so airports can better handle the workload with the personnel available.
To help operators optimise staff management processes, the advanced graphic user interface (GUI) of TAV Technologies’ GHS supports users in their decision-making processes. They are guided to act accordingly in time-critical operational cases via informative visual indicators, easy-to-notice warnings, colour-coded resources, and rule-based flights.
Applications can be manually configured with multi-station, multi-unit and multi-language settings so each airport could use the system in their own operational manner.
Flexible task creation modules for automated task management
TAV Technologies says: “GHS is designed to save airport operators from manual work as much as possible, thus giving them more time to concentrate on their important problems.”
Designed to support all critical resource management processes of airports, the TAV Technologies GHS features three different modules to cover ground-based airport operations.
These include:
- Task Management module
- Update Management module
- Planning (Gantt Chart) Management module
Also, flight and resource information are received by the integration with other systems. It is possible whether to use or ignore the integration data via configurations. Thanks to the GHS’ flexible task creation module, it generates tasks based on engagement standards from received flights. An optimization tool also allocates these tasks to available resources while considering selected key performance indicators (KPIs) into account.
The GHS also handles situations frequently encountered in operations that cannot be configured in other applications such as changes in park positions, load types and passenger numbers.
Also, mobile application has been developed in order to work synchronously with the GHS system. Communication between the GHS and resource mobile devices are handled automatically in a dynamic way.
Real-time airport resource management
In the light of experience gained by managing many airports, it has been understood that some actions should be taken in the operation against the current time. A GHS should able to manage turnaround flight tasks and efficiently handle relevant updates.
Using intelligent rule-based conflict management, TAV Technologies’ GHS can optimise airport operations to accommodate last-minute changes and resolve errors.
Its real-time automated scheduling function significantly reduces the number of operational errors and the solution can provide notifications about required actions and flight changes. This helps improve operational profits, resource management and communication among personnel.
Innovative staff organisation technologies
Although the GHS is currently installed in airports worldwide, TAV Technologies aims to enhance the system to incorporate machine learning, artificial intelligence and deep learning techniques to automatically predict and create shift team structures.
The company says: “As the system operates, it is planned to record the number of personnel and team structure in each shift and make it ready for use in the future.
“In addition, it is planned to prepare training data by learning the team structure and changes, team members and skills, flight data in the system and the personnel or resource qualifications required by these flights with artificial intelligence.”
