Q: Global air travel rebounds to 74 percent of pre-pandemic levels since the pandemic hits. What role does Transoft Solutions play to help gear up airport operation management as air travel demand picks up? European airports and ground handlers are grappling with complex airport operational challenges since travel resumes post-covid. What solutions can Transoft offer to airports in Asia Pacific, the only one region in the world expected, to recover by 2023.
Transoft Solutions offers a range of software products that help airports manage their operations in a safe, efficient, and sustainable way.
Independent of air traffic levels, safety remains the highest priority in aviation, and obstacle-free takeoffs and approaches need to be guaranteed. Transoft Solutions’ SkySAFE software allows accurate analysis of permanent and temporary obstacles at and around the airport. The airport operator can confidently assess the obstacle situation and report it to the relevant authorities to ensure compliance. On the airfield, the AviPLAN software assists planners and operational staff to manage safety-related matters associated with the movement and parking of aircraft. This applies to checking safety clearances or minimising jet blast impact during taxiing, pushback operations from gates, or aircraft taxi-out procedures. The software is also used to ensure a safe and compliant parking stand layout, including assessment of passenger boarding bridge operations and ground service vehicle circulation around the aircraft during turnaround. If there is any doubt or concern about where to park an unexpected aircraft visitor, the Aircraft Data Viewer tool provides operational staff with all relevant information regarding dimensions and other pertinent characteristics. Finally, AeroSTRIPE is a software that enables airside pavement marking design and application in accordance with regulatory standards.
Transoft Solutions’ software tools don’t only provide functionality relevant for safety compliance; they also offer significant productivity enhancements for the staff involved. When it comes to efficiency in airside operations, AviPLAN contains a dedicated tool to optimize parking at the gate for a large group of aircraft types while ensuring proper boarding bridge connections, fuel servicing, electricity supply, and more for each individual aircraft. Having the possibility to handle more types of aircraft results in increased flexibility and efficiency in operations.
Transoft Solutions’ AirTOP fast-time simulation software is in a world of its own. The tool consists of multiple functional modules that cover a wide range of applications at the airport and in the surrounding airspace. Starting in the passenger terminal, AirTOP is used to model and analyze passenger flows and processes such as check-in, security, and immigration control. Evaluations of proposed infrastructure modifications or changes in processes can be carried out, and what-if analyses conducted, all before incurring significant costs. The software can also be used to optimize resource allocation during the day, for example, by creating an efficient check-in counter opening scheme. Outside the passenger terminal, the software can be used to visualize potential airside and air traffic capacity bottlenecks and test alternative scenarios. This can lead to more efficient taxi routings or use of the available gates and remote parking positions, as well as avoiding excessive use of holding areas.
AirTOP is increasingly used to make airport operations more sustainable. An example is the evaluation of the “taxibot” concept, in which a semi-robotic, pilot-controlled towing tractor brings aircraft to the departure runway without burning fuel in the meantime. AirTOP can calculate and display key performance indicators such as runway queuing time, taxi time, and fuel burn, as well as compare different scenarios to aid in decision-making.
Q: What are your thoughts about Smart Airports? How do you think this can change the future of the aviation industry and how can Transoft Solutions play a role in this?
Smart Airports is a broad term being used today, often encompassing passenger experience, sustainability, the ‘connected airport’, innovation, and data.
Data has been and continues to be an area that all airport stakeholders are investing in, including passenger and cargo operations data, air traffic management data, passenger terminal operations data, energy consumption, and others. An increasing volume of data must be evaluated and interpreted, whether from existing data sources or new data capture. This information is used to serve common goals of sustainability, efficiency or capacity improvements, operational improvements, and customer experience or customer satisfaction. Quite simply, airport users and stakeholders are communicating with each other differently and sharing or exchanging more information.
Transoft Solutions is an important partner in helping airports become smarter. One of the company’s existing software products, AviPLAN, is being used extensively at the vast majority of the world’s largest airports for airside planning, design, and operations. While another, AirTOP, is used to evaluate various Conops (concept of operations), operational changes, new international standards and requirements, and even the impacts of social distancing on all aspects of passenger terminal operations.
As standards, guidelines, and processes change, these tools are critical in assisting airports to evaluate, accommodate, and implement change. The outputs provide decision-making guidance on operational expenditure (OPEX), such as resourcing, staffing, energy, and capital investment to be ready for the future, as well as customer experience. The increase in volume and diversity of data improves the quality of the results, which directly benefits the airports.