The Flight Information Display System (FIDS) is a vital component of the airports overall wayfinding program. The FIDS system is designed to provide airport management with automated control to distribute and display critical information to the traveling public, airport tenants, and airport operational staff.
As airports migrate to a common use and shared tenant services environment, directional signage at the terminals, check-in desks, gates, and baggage carousels must be distributed in a dynamic format to facilitate the changing operational environment. The FIDS system also provides visual paging for the hearing impaired and supports the display of weather information, promotional and advertising information.
The FIDS system is a key component of the airports integrated operational systems and is directly connected to the airport Operational Database and Resource Management. The closely coupled system allows for the automated displaying of critical information to those who need it, when they need it with little or no manual intervention.
The FIDS design is comprised of a control center, distribution servers, input terminals and display technology. The FIDS control center is responsible for storing, processing and transferring all data (flight and general information). The processed information is sent by FIDS via LAN to the connected distribution servers. This is performed in real-time in order to ensure that the users of display media are supplied with high-quality consistent information. This information is then processed and transferred to the corresponding display devices by the distribution server.
The FIDS system communicates and supports most any type of display device such as CRT monitors, LCD flat panels, plasma displays, split flap boards and LED signage.
A key benefit of the FIDS is the system architecture. The FIDS runs on Sun Solaris as the Operating System and Oracle as the RDBMS. These platforms were chosen for their unprecedented reliability that leverage and represent the most advanced technological multimedia functionality. The Digital Video Controllers (DVC) run Windows XP or Mac OSX and the JAVA application (DJACO) that provides the airport with state-of-the-art multi-media functionality and flexibility.