Unlocking a World of Airport Data with Arup’s Airport Demand Analyser tool
Flight schedules are at the core of airport operations, both terminal and airside, such as gate allocations, baggage and security. For airports to maximise their operational capacity and flexibility whilst minimising their environmental impacts, being aware of demand patterns and characteristics in detail becomes crucial.
Messy Data
Such analysis requires gathering data from airports, airlines and integrating with corresponding reference data.
Previous analysis were restricted by limited, unclean airport data, the use of traditional tools such as Excel and scripting techniques which often result in fragmented intelligence and duplicated effort.
Often this data is incomplete, duplicated, inaccurate, and limited to specific airports. For example, the data may show that a single tail number has be inaccurately assigned to multiple aircrafts that are flying simultaneously. Alternatively, a flight may not be reported as cancelled however other data attributes inform that it did not fly thus its status can be inferred.
Arup’s Solution
To overcome this, by combining Arup’s data capabilities and aviation planning expertise, we developed the Airport Demand Analyser (ADA) — a data product enabled by our in-house managed data lake with ~250GB of historical and future flight data from 1,000 airports globally. ADA is a tool that harvests, processes and analyses the historical and future flight data from 1000 airports. Used by our aviation planners, environmental consultants and other aviation businesses, the ADA aims to unlock valuable insights for our clients to make better data-driven decisions.
Around 40MB of historical flight status data and 6GB of future flight schedules are ingested daily into the data lake from OAG — a third party data provider — to empower several downstream data analytics and modelling tools. ADA’s data pipelines ingest the raw data from OAG and make the processed data available to our aviation planners within a couple of hours.
This allows our aviation planners to use the latest data to advise their clients on planning and forecasting air traffic demand. In addition, the data profiling and quality assessments undertaken by our data and aviation teams has allowed us to provide OAG with useful feedback on improving their data lake. OAG have taken our feedback on board and are now seeking to upgrade their data to make it more accessible.
The ADA is architected on the Amazon Web Services cloud and it provides a robust software development cycle that is extensible, scalable and provide reliable solutions to data gathering, processing and analyses.
The product is now live at Arup and is being used by 100s of our aviation planners. ADA encompasses a number of algorithms for data preparation, cleaning and integration which ensure high quality datasets are available for analyses. By using automated dashboards in Power BI, we can provide data evidences to our clients in different regions and help them make more informed, up to date decisions on planning their terminal and airside operations.
Given the ability to quickly access large sets of data in a pre-processed format for a large number of global airports, our aviation experts are now able to unlock valuable insights and focus on providing in-depth and data-driven solutions to our clients, rather than spending duplicated time and effort on processing aircraft movement data.
Developing this tool has meant being able to access this data and deliver tasks in just a few hours — which usually would take weeks or previously would not have been feasible — therefore, saving nearly 80% of our time. The tool has already proven to be useful to advise on wider airport planning and operations, such as environment, baggage and security and transport and has created new client opportunities with major airports.
Repurposing ADA for COVID-19 Impact
In the current COVID-19 situation, the ADA can provide insights to help improve the estimations of timing, pace, volume and typology of the air travel demand recovery. Valuable data insights of global, regional and local demand growth patterns as well as airline schedule operations in other parts of the world can be used to inform business decisions to support clients through an unprecedented period of difficulty.
These flight schedules are highly volatile, depending on government announcements and demand. The ADA team have ensured there is a robust software development cycle, and data can be reprocessed on demand.
Future Possibilities
As we continue to evolve this tool, it is being used extensively by our aviation planners to deliver consultancy projects to our aviation clients and create opportunities in new areas such as understanding and mapping carbon emissions to type of aircrafts.
The toolkit will be key for the recovery of the aviation industry recovers from the unprecedented times of COVID-19.
The ADA tool can prove to be instrumental in influencing parts of construction projects within airports in the UK, because it give a realistic picture of how and when airports will go back to normal and if there is an actual need for newer infrastructure. For example, linking flight schedules with car parking movement can help commercial managers make informed decisions on refurbishment and introducing measures to manage peak traffic.
The wide adoption of the multipurpose, multifaceted ADA product across Arup has confirmed the success of this initiative, along with these new opportunities being discussed with clients that otherwise would not have been as readily achievable in such a short time period.
Find out more
If any of the content in this article is of interest, please get in touch with Aastha Madaan for more information about the people and work involved in this project at aastha.madaan@arup.com
If you would like to learn about Data Analytics at Arup meet the team, and read more about our work here.
