The Vancouver International Airport is known for being innovative. Over the past year, YVR has stepped up its innovativeness with the launch of their Innovation Hub @YVR – an initiative bringing YVR’s local tech-minded business community and the airport together with a goal of helping each through the COVID-19 Pandemic. YVR’s Vice President, Innovation and Chief Information Officer, Lynette DuJohn said that work on the Innovation Hub began in the midst of the pandemic during July 2020.
“COVID-19 is simply the biggest challenge we have ever faced as an airport. As we continue to navigate through the pandemic, we will move beyond this role and focus on aligning to the future growth and needs of our community and economy. Thus, rethinking our operations to become our region’s gateway to the new economy. We started looking at our assets and how they could link to the growing tech community in our region. And we got to thinking about, how could we help the tech community not only incubate ideas, but also how could they actually bring their products to market and to scale?” DuJohn recalled.
DuJohn continued that when you think about an airport as a small city, any technology can be tested and trialed at an airport – and that’s the concept from which the Innovation Hub, in part, sprang from. It was further propelled when YVR got a new CEO, Tamara Vrooman, who expanded on the idea and helped bring it to fruition.
“We had always been considered quite innovative at YVR. As an example, we provide order processing kiosks that airports across Canada and around the world use which we developed in-house atYVR. We sell those products to other airports and so, the idea was, how do we expand our innovation approach to go beyond passenger processing into new areas, given that passenger numbers were down,” DuJohn added.
The long-term goals of the Innovation Hub are to not only help the local businesses, but to diversify the partnerships the airport has and grow a problem-solving community.
“We didn't want to, if we have a problem, go out and just try to find one company to be able to help solve those problems, but how can we bring multiple organizations together so that they can learn and thrive off each other. And so, that is one of the big goals,” DuJohn said.
Work began on the Innovation Hub in earnest over November 2020 and the Innovation Hub launched fully this past spring, with a number of partners already onboard. Those involved so far include The British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), Unity Technologies, GeoSim Cities and Vanderlande.
BCIT is using the airport to give students real world experience and trial Internet of Things (IoT) sensors.
“They were creating their own center of excellence around IoT, or internet of things, and when they start this, the students needed a lab to be able to install sensors and to understand things. So, instead of building their own lab, they're going to use the airport as a lab. So, that's an example of a partnership that we have with higher edudcation.,” DuJohn said.
GeoSim Cities and Unity are making a digital twin of the airport. And Vanderlande, who DuJohn said was exploring launching their own innovation center but instead chose to utilize YVR’s Innovation Hub, are also taking advantage of the digital twin technology.
“We're working together on how we can do innovation as partnersand how they could be twinning the baggage system and learning from us so that they can understand how digital twinning could help their other customers around the world,” DuJohn said.
DuJohn said YVR is in talks with others to be part of the innovation Hub and interest around it is growing.
“More people that hear about it, the more people are interested and it's just through conversations that we're making these connections. Many, many organizations are focused on innovation in this region and I think through COVID, a lot of companies are pivoting and will be putting more emphasis in this area. And so, through that, we're seeing that there's more and more interest in working with us in partnership,” she said.
A question DuJohn said she gets often about the Innovation Hub is whether or not it is a physical space, such as a room or building, but she says they haven’t limited the Hub to a specific area.
“It's the whole airport that we consider an innovation platform, in addition to the airport’s digital twin. So, we haven't limited to a particular place. We do see over time having facilitates where people can physically come together to have conversations or try things out,” she said.
Digital Twinning
While still early in the Innovation Hub @YVR’s life, DuJohn said the airport is already seeing the benefits of it from the work that GeoSims Cities and Unity are doing with the airport’s digital twin – as well as BCIT’s IoT sensor project.
“With the digital twin, we’re already seeing that we're developing some situational awareness tools. So, we have feeds that help us understand how passengers are moving through the airport and as COVID volumes come up … we're able to model all of those passenger flows as the traffic picks up. That is just one example in our airport operations where the digital twin has really helped us,” she said.
Unity’s heritage is based in video games, primarily as part of a game’s engine. However, as Tim Wong, lead, industry solutions, of Unity described, the company is expanding their capabilities and know-how into more industrial solutions.
“That includes automotive, transportation, manufacturing, architecture, engineering, construction, et cetera. So, really looking at how we can take the real-time 3D platform that we have and the scale of all these different solutions. My team is focused on working with customers like the Vancouver International Airport to build these kinds of custom solutions using these platforms,” Wong continued.
Unity and YVR have had a relationship for some time through work the two have done together in the past and more generally through the local business community. With the Innovation Hub and YVR’s shift in leadership, putting more importance on the digital world, the digital twin project started in November 2020.
“When COVID hit and limited passengers coming in, YVR had the capacity to look at how can they use technologies like digital twins to change their operations and be able to drive business decisions using these types of technologies. They invited us to come in initially to do kind of these envisioning sessions with other business partners as well, and to just really ideate what can we do together,” Wong said.
A digital twin is not just a digital representation of a physical space, but a digital representation, whether 2D or 3D, that is connected to right time data and right time being.
“It's not necessarily real-time in an instance, but it's the right time that allows you to make business decisions. Then the last thing is that a digital twin also allows you to be able to drive decision-making,” Wong said.
Conversations around the digital twin began with a series of design thinking session with different business groups and airport operations teams to understand YVR’s core business challenges.
“What are they seeing that that can be improved with real-time 3D technology? From there we put together a plan, what are some low hanging fruits that we can work on together with them? Is there a kind of a need to help them build their internal capabilities as well, so that they could continue to take this and continue to build different features on top of that,” Wong said.
What they landed on was creating a situational awareness tool with the digital twin, which has been the main area of focus with the project – becoming aware of where passengers are, where the patchy densities are and understanding potential impacts to passenger flow so that YVR can make decisions that will improve their service levels, Wong said.
“It was very clear that they needed a baseline. So, where we started was ensuring that we work closely with their CAD and their architecture team to ensure that we have the latest data, the latest information on their buildings and facility. From there we ingested all those different types of data into Unity so that we can begin building the different visualizations to model what's actually going on in the airport,” Wong said.
YVR’s twin exists in both 2D and 3D and is supplied with data from YVR’s data team to ensure it has the latest information. This ensures that the model itself is intelligent and it's supplied with a sufficient meta data to represent what's actually happening at the airport historically.
Wong said that the YVR is doing some exciting things – such as no longer viewing the airport as just a building, but how it facilitates the movement of people, commerce and ideas.
“They really do want to kind of have this foundational digital twin platform that they can then take and work with the ecosystem of partners that they have to extend functionality features, so that they can take what YVR has built and see if they could do something on their own to improve logistics, whatever the use case might be,” he said.
For the airport's passengers, DuJohn said one of the short term goals with the digital twin is helping people with accessibility. Currently, the airport offers tours for passengers with autism, allowing them to go through, see and experience the airport prior to their trip to help familiarize themselves with the environment. With the digital twin, these tours can be given from the comfort of a person’s home.
“So, if you're a little afraid of flying or you haven't flown before, being able to experience it safely and from your own home before you're actually in the facility, I think would be a huge benefit for people with accessibility challenges. Through YVR’s Digital Twin, being able to illustrate exactly how they want to move through the airport, or, are you just really interested in what that experience will be before you leave, is an exceptional tool to have.” DuJohn said.
IoT Sensing
The other project off the ground at YVR’s Innovation Hub is the partnership with BCIT and giving their students a place to practice the real-world skills they’ll need in their careers, while benefiting the airport through the application of IoT Sensors.
The first project the students are tackling at YVR is an environmental issue.
“One of the problems that we have is, we do quite a bit of manual data collection for storm water management and the students right now are in the process of designing a system that would be able to provide sensors to read various data points and automatically provide a statement. So, they're designing that right now in conjunction with our environmental team. And in the fall, they will be installing those sensors and we'll start getting some dashboards and information so that we can understand that area of our business better,” DuJohn said.
YVR is essentially an island, described Jonathan Bassan, director, IoT, with BCIT. YVR is right on the ocean with arms of the Fraser River running down either side of it.
“It is susceptible to a lot of influences by tide and high flow of meltwater down the Fraser and there's a need to monitor constantly all the canals that drain there at the airfield and the airport area,” said Bassan.
The IoT sensors will also be used to monitor water quality and parameters to ensure that it is clean.
“All the area around the airport is wildlife and pristine so the first actual project that we're going to be doing with the airport is going to replace a whole lot of manual sensing and some old valves that are not working properly with new IoT sensors. And the whole concept will be to be able to monitor 24 hours what's happening in all of the canals around the airports so that we understand what happens when there's a high tide, what happens when there's a lot of water coming down the Fraser, are we having any problems draining off anywhere,” Bassan said.
The students at BCIT will be heading out to the airport to begin work in September during their first semester. Bassan said that due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, he imagines that the first semester may be slow going with first IoT sensor prototypes being installed at the airport in the student’s second semester.
“We'll have students continuously come into it and be a team of between 10 and 15 different students from different areas. So, we're going to have students from engineering because we need to take care of making sure that these sensors are protected in a dirty water canal. There's a tide that goes up about two yards there so how do you handle all the mechanical aspects of deploying a sensor into that environment? We are going to have, of course, students from computing and from cloud looking at the sensors themselves, getting the data up into the cloud. How do you get all the communication out into a cloud? There's no Wi-Fi out there so how are they going to solve all those different areas,” Bassan described.
At the end of the project, Bassan said that YVR will have dashboard where they can see all the information that the IoT sensors are picking up.
“You can actually see the information and have some analytics behind it so that we can actually analyze the information and get feedback. What happens if you see a rise in oxygen and a canal and it’s high tide there. Is there any correlation. There's a lot of research that's going to go into this later on to analyze the data that we collect,” Bassan said.
Bassan said that he thinks that the project will take up to two years to complete. In that time, though, what he says will be the real benefit to YVR, is the ideas that the students will be bringing to the table.
“If you bring a brand new idea into a room full of experts, they'll shoot it down. Each one is being there they're all skeptic, 'No, it won't work.' 'No. We've tried something like it.' There's this bank of knowledge which is often used to kill an idea before it's even explored. And what happens with these kids, they don't have all the expertise and they don't shoot the idea down and they follow it and suddenly you discover that actually, if you twist this little idea that everybody was shooting down, if you take it a little to the right suddenly, ‘Oh that might work,’” Bassan said.
“So that's something which I find is really, really key if you want to encourage innovation, sometimes you need to ignore the experts.”
