How Schiphol Airport is tackling queues with data
At IoT Tech Expo in Amsterdam last week, Schiphol Airport’s chief data officer began his talk on data and aviation by letting international guests know that he can’t give individual guidance on how early to get to the airport, “but the general advice is four hours.”
For a one-hour flight back to the UK, that’s at least half a day’s travel.
With queues backing up for miles and passengers missing their flights as a result, Tor Bøe-Lillegraven, who has been chief data officer of Royal Schiphol Group since 2019, admitted: “It’s quite brutal.”
The passenger issues and airline delays at the Netherlands airport have remained unresolved for months, culminating in the resignation of Schiphol Airport’s CEO Dick Benschop, earlier this month.
The queues and missed flights caused chaos for many delegates from events such as broadcast tech fest IBC, with many left stranded and sleeping in the airport overnight, until the y could catch a departing flight/
While many frustrated passengers may have praised the move, it left Bøe-Lillegraven – who has worked on the airport’s data strategy for the last three years, feeling disappointed.
There are many moving parts to solving these passenger issues, Bøe-Lillegraven explained, and it will be a challenge for the next CEO, but he said that he intended to do his part with data.
Schiphol airport had already been undergoing its own digitisation programme for several years, connecting its data with Internet of Things (IoT) devices and edge computing.
Bøe-Lillegraven joined Schiphol three years ago after working at online marketplace eBay, as “their data guy.” In comparison to eBay, the challenges at Schiphol are vastly different, Bøe-Lillegraven said, because at eBay the consumer is on their personal device, and “when you find something, you buy something.”
So, although eBay has a huge amount of data, “it’s fairly homogenous.”
At Schiphol however, he added that there was “there’s all kinds of stuff” to consider: Passengers, staff, trucks, IoT devices (scanners and sensors), buildings and airplanes – all of which carry data.
Fortunately, Schiphol was already “one of the most digitised airports in the world,” by the time Bøe-Lillegraven joined, and it had already started to analyse and use its data to make decisions – a decent inkling, Bøe-Lillegraven added, that the airport had a good level of “data maturity.”
However, he noted: “One of the challenges for me, when I joined Schiphol in 2019, was that I did not know what was going on under the hood.”
While Bøe-Lillegraven claimed that he could see how the digital world connected to the physical world in a way that he’d never seen before at Schiphol, he thought that the airport needed to modernise its data strategy.
He noted that since he joined in 2019, many terms and processes had become outdated. For example, Schiphol airport used to have a centralised datalake but has now moved towards a more decentralised ‘data mesh’ system, to enable data to be accessed more seamlessly by individual project teams.
According to Bøe-Lillegraven there were three priorities needed to transform the way it handled and analysed its data to make the passenger experience seamless.
The first he stated, was the need to automate – a challenge that teams are still addressing in 2022, particularly with the need for automated baggage and security processes.
