Airports worldwide are becoming more aware of the importance of having ground transportation management systems that have an integrated ability to control both traditional taxi traffic with a dispatch function and ‘appride’ digital forms, such as Transportation Network Companies (e.g. Uber, Lyft). Swedavia AB, a state-owned company that operates 10 state-owned airports in Sweden, recently selected GateKeeper Systems to provide this functionality.
The main functionality Swedavia was looking for was the ability to track and control the traffic flows around the airports and to be able to charge commercial vehicles for accessing the airports with a minimum amount of administration. In addition, the system will be integrated with existing systems such as Swedavia’s ERP system and Business Intelligence (BI) software for statistics.
The system will initially be implemented in Q4 of 2019 at Swedavia’s Bromma Stockholm Airport (2.5 million passengers) and Stockholm Arlanda Airport (26.6M passengers) airports, then scale to the remaining Swedavia airports beginning in 2020: Kiruna Airport (282M passengers), Luleå Airport (1.2M passengers, Umeå Airport (1.05M passengers), Åre Östersund Airport (531k passengers), Göteborg Landvetter Airport (6.8M passengers), Visby Airport (491k passengers), Ronneby Airport (237k passengers), and Malmö Airport (2.2M passengers).
“We met a large number of the requirements with our current system,” commented Brian Richardson, GateKeeper Systems’ President. “But there are a few items that we’ve developed as a result of Swedavia’s requirements that will also benefit others, including globalization, multi-factor dispatch priority, and single system for multiple airports.”
Key decision issues for Swedavia:
1) Minimize environmental impact of commercial vehicle activity. Restrict vehicles based on fuel type, so rather than a dispatch queue of first-in/first-out, use a system which analyzes several environmental factors of each vehicle, vehicles with passenger loads (discourage trips with no passenger) and time-in-queue;
2) Security and privacy of data maintained. Supporting Swedavia’s desire to be in compliance with new EU GDPR laws and cyber security prevention features;
3) System information for analytics. Analyze data generated from multiple sources, including report generation, data export to other systems, real-time dashboards, screens, data on current vehicle activity, and feedback on system health and status;
4) Reliability features. Monitoring, alarms, notifications, and updates;
5) Single System. One instance of the system to operate at all 10 airports;
6) Highly Configurable. Minimize or eliminate the need for new software for operational changes (e.g. physical layout, business rules, addition of other types of ground transportation.
7) Customer service support. Features to respond quickly to peak activity periods to limit wait time, and communicate status to drivers in real-time;
8) Localization/globalization. Use Swedish monetary system (Swedish Krona), some language localization, day/date presentation (use EU format day/month/year).
According to GateKeeper’s Richardson, also important to Swedavia’s decision were the reliability of GateKeeper as a company as well as its software. “Knowing we have a large user base of airports that they can talk to was also key,” said Richardson.