As baggage handling increasingly benefits from automation, NetForecast has identified an opportunity to measure and assess the network performance of connected autonomous vehicles on the ramp.
The Charlottesville, Virginia-based firm is already helping airlines monitor airport cellular links to pinpoint trouble spots that can impede pilots from communicating with internal systems and each other. And it measures inflight connectivity to ensure airlines are delivering the experiences that passengers expect.
But if baggage handlers don’t have good cellular service under wing, it can delay aircraft turnaround times. This applies also to autonomous cargo and baggage tractors which are increasingly being pressed into service as part of airline trials around the world.
“And so, we help with that,” said company president Rebecca Wetzel of NetForecast’s monitoring services for connected driverless vehicles. “And it was airlines who pointed us in that direction and said, ‘hey, here’s another problem we would like you to solve.’ So, we’re very agile and we can take our technology, our application, our software as a service (SaaS) and apply it in different areas to solve different performance problems that airlines have.”
NetForecast’s application runs in the background and continually tests the connectivity of the machine. “It monitors the health essentially of the connectivity and feeds that data back to us. And we can show on a map how the service is, how the coverage is, and how the performance is,” Wetzel explained to RGN on the sidelines of the Future Travel Experience (FTE) conference and exhibition in Long Beach, California.
Airlines can see at a glance what the score is, and what the quality of experience (QoE) score is over time, she noted. “You can set [your parameters]; do I want to look at a month? Do I want to look at a day? Do I want to look at an hour? And we can also show over time what the trends are.”
This data is then used to develop predictive analytics so airlines can know, for example, when to expect cellular performance to drop, and in turn work with their service providers to better accommodate peak periods — when passengers might also be competing for bandwidth.
Whilst the transition to an autonomous ramp will take time, it’s an important emerging landscape, as underscored by SITA’s Baggage IT Insights 2024 report, which suggests that full automation should be the “ultimate goal” for industry.
NetForecast‘s Wetzel was on the ground at FTE — and is participating in its Baggage Innovation Working Group — to learn about next steps. Within the Working Group, she said, “a lot of grey matter” is being applied to the problems of baggage handling and how to make it more efficient and faster, and also to take the burden off of the employees.
If there are areas of poor coverage within the airport where autonomous vehicles are scuttling around, “if they lose a connection, you can’t have these vehicles stopping on the tarmac,” she noted.
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