International. In 2017, Manchester Airport was the third busiest airport in the UK with over 27 million passengers. Thanks to a sustained annual growth of between 5 and 10% in recent years, the airport is currently in an expansion program to expand its capacity by more than 50 million passengers annually.
This trend is reflected in the establishment of new entertainment activities: leisure, gastronomy, shopping or culture, among others, in the so-called "aerotropolis". The ultimate goal is to make waiting times more enjoyable and make the passenger experience truly comfortable, improving conditions and improving processes within the terminal.
The Internet of Things helps solve these problems in the same way it does in smart city projects. It is remarkable that smart airports are a combination of small smart cities and smart buildings.
Innotech Insights Ltd., a provider of solutions within crowd observation and passenger data collection, deployed a number of devices to monitor the movement of people and crowd behaviour at Manchester Airport.
The company chose Libelium's Meshlium scanner to detect smartphones and cellular devices, measuring people's movements inside the airport. Six devices, optimized for temporary application using Innotech's off-grid POE power packages, were installed through the terminals to understand flows, detect and prevent potential bottlenecks and, especially, ensure the safety of people.
Meshlium Scanner can detect any device that works with WiFi or Bluetooth interfaces. These devices can be detected without the need to be connected to a specific access point, allowing detection of any smartphone, laptop or hands-free device entering the Meshlium coverage area at a certain point and at a specific time.
Innotech Insights scans devices over WiFi to monitor people's movements and crowd behavior. Meshlium Scanner collected anonymous analytical data by collecting WiFi signals in the sensor areas and automatically transmitted the data to the Crowded platform. From there, the Crowded platform, created by Innotech Insights provides an accurate and cost-effective pedestrian movement analysis solution that meets the growing demands of the public and private sectors.
By creating a network of independent sensors, more than 90% of individuals in most areas come together and the system sends that raw information directly to Crowded, which automatically generates graphs and visual maps to display simple graphs for the customer.
The initial requirement for this project was to monitor pedestrian movement around the airport at its designated locations: capture visitor volume per day, identify and track all captured visitors as "unique individuals" to delineate actual travel, show areas that could be considered bottlenecks, indicate unexpected areas of "abode" to highlight safety issues, and show an average travel time across all areas. identified according to individual movements.
These measurements are extremely useful for predicting the needs of people at airports and for tracking evacuation and safety routes. In addition, it can be highlighted that the technology of the Meshlium scanner can be complemented with sensor networks that identify the environmental conditions within the airport facilities (humidity, temperature, noise or air quality), which allows managers to guarantee their commercial spaces a level of comfort in which they operate. Favor the consumption of passengers, which is highly appreciated by stores.
"We chose the Meshlium scanner because it has been part of our overall solution for some time, as we believe it is the most advanced scanning technology on the market," said Liam Wright, Managing Director of Innotech Insights.
Wright highlights the excellent feedback they're getting, with great interest from transportation consultants, cities, major shopping malls, and transportation hubs.
Once the hardware has been expanded, the platform can process data from hundreds of projects anywhere in the world and will be available as temporary and permanent installations with a monthly subscription that will be much more cost-effective than current methods of data collection. .
"Libelium is fantastic in its support and we look forward to a strong working relationship as we deliver continued advances in data collection," said Liam Wright.
Source: Libelium.
