ALSTEF holds a long-term partnership with TAV for the design, installation and maintenance of the Baggage Handling System at Istanbul Atatürk International Airport, and now has been awarded the contract for the design and installation of an Early Bag Store.
Since Istanbul Atatürk has become a major hub for Turkish Airlines, with a capacity of 45M PAX, the EBS has become necessary to store for a few hours a large number of bags in transfer at the Airport.
The difficulty for TAV was to install the EBS in the very narrow space available in the main sortation hall, and to take into consideration the high flow peaks in the baggage sortation system.
ALSTEF has proposed to build the EBS on a mezzanine above the existing tilt tray sorter, and to split it into two parts. Thus the technical characteristics of the EBS will be unusual, due to the size of the building, with storage for 1,200 bags and an input capacity of approximately 1,600 bags per hour. Seven high-speed shuttles will dispatch the bags to sixty storage lanes. The bags will be stored according to time slots or flight numbers.
The challenge for ALSTEF is to carry out the project within a very short time. Six months are scheduled for the design, manufacturing, installation and commissioning.
Thanks to Alstef’s high level of expertise to perform the works during the airport operations, these will not be interrupted. The existing sortation system will be running at full capacity while the EBS will be installed, just two meters above the main tilt tray sorter.
This EBS will be fully managed by a dedicated module of BAGWARE, the Baggage Handling Management Software developed by ALSTEF. This software has been managing the entire Istanbul Ataturk Airport Baggage Handling System since 2010. The system will be fully flexible and will allow customization in real time whenever the airport operations will progress.