Baggage handling specialists acquire global reach

The prospect of a contract that may be worth up to A$100 million to supply a new baggage system to Sydney Airport’s International Terminal (TI) is drawing the attention of major international suppliers such as Siemens, Vanderlande Industries and Crisplant. A tender is expected to be issued before the end of 2010.

While the big international players have been largely absent from the Australian airport scene in recent years, Siemens in particular has been active in northern Asia.

In February the German company won a 20 million Euro contract from the China West Airport Group to equip the new Terminal 3 of Xi’an Xianyang International Airport with a complete baggage handling system incorporating the latest technology and capable of dealing with up to 31 million passengers a year.

Siemens’ system at Incheon International Airport’s satellite terminal A, completed in mid-2008, involved 10,000 tons of structural steel and 70 kilometres of belt and tray technology capable of sorting and delivering to their destination more than 2700 pieces of luggage per hour.

This pales, however, against the system installed by Siemens at Terminal 3 of Beijng International Airport, which can sort and transport up to 19,200 bags per hour.

No less than 330 check-in counters are connected to a 68-kilometre, high speed, tray-conveyor system which runs out of sight of passengers at a number of levels inside the airport. The trays are equipped with RFID tags.

Bags are transported through a 2.2 kilometre tunnel at 36 kph per hour from the check-in counters in Terminal T3A to the loading carousels in International Terminal T3A. Powered by more than 9000 motors, the system requires less than 25 minutes to deliver a bag from one aircraft to another, no matter where they are parked at the sprawling airport.

No details of the Sydney requirement have yet been released, but BCS and Glidepath, currently the leading suppliers of baggage handling systems to Australian airports, have both confirmed they will be bidding in partnership with overseas companies.

 

BCS on growth path

Success for Auckland-based BCS would fill one of the few holes in its Australian portfolio – the only major terminals where its systems are not installed are Sydney, Qantas Melbourne and Adelaide.

“When the Adelaide business came up we were already tendering for Perth, Darwin and Cairns and we simply couldn’t do everything,” says David Jerram, BCS’ general manager Airport Systems, speaking to Aviation Business Asia-Pacific in late April.

“At the moment we’re doing consulting work in Darwin, projects in Ayres Rock, Cairns, Qantas Sydney, Brisbane Domestic and Brisbane International, in Canberra, in Melbourne, and design work in Perth.”

Recent projects completed by the company away from its core Australia-New Zealand market include Maui-Hawaii, Cantho-Vietnam, Kalibo-Philippines, Jacksons-PNG, and systems in Morocco and Oman.

However, the immediate focus is on completing the new outbound system in Melbourne’s International Terminal (T2), given the size of the $40-50 million project and the unique relationship between BCS and Australia Pacific Airports Melbourne.

In 2008 the two companies signed an historic five-year relationship framework agreement, with an option for a further five years, with an estimated value of $50 million. This amount does not include the T2 outbound system. The comprehensive contract makes BCS responsible for the whole of life cycle of the BHS system at Melbourne Airport from design and simulation through to supply, installation, operations and maintenance.

The agreement is intended to move away from the adversarial aspect of competitive tendering to a long-term partnership in which both parties share potential benefits and efficiencies through a strategic and cooperative approach.

BCS completed a new inbound system at Melbourne Terminal 2 in 2008. This involves six single-line belt-conveyor bag lines, each about 120 metres long, and made up of up to 20 separate belt conveyors of various lengths and functionality.

All of the motor-driven belt-conveyors feature decentralised drive technology and each conveyor is equipped with an SEW-Eurodrive geared motor, paired with one of the company’s electronic variable-speed drive solutions – the Movitrac LTE IP55 frequency converter.

The system is overseen by a central control room utilising an airport-wide Security Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system and CCTV network. The Movitrac LTE are interfaced with the airport’s programmable logic controllers (PLC), providing operators with central, single-point configurable control for all motion applications.

According to SEC-Eurodrive, the Movitrac LTE can be configured for drive, monitoring and control via an inbuilt keypad, an onboard RS485 port for PC access, an infrared optical link for wireless connectivity to PDA or smartphone, or through a portable programming stick.

BCS key account manager Djordje Petrovic says the same motors and

frequency converters are being used as part of the outbound system. This is some four to five times larger than the project to upgrade and expand the terminal’s inbound facilities due to the complexity of the sortation process.

So large, in fact, that a terminal extension has been constructed on the airport apron to accommodate the system, with additional retail space on the upper level.

While some bags will continue to be delivered to baggage handlers on existing belt-conveyors, the majority will arrive at nine large new carousels via two high speed energy-efficient tilt tray sorter systems manufactured by the Danish company Crisplant.

With the all-important issue of system redundancy in mind, both tilt-tray sorters will each be run off separate sub-systems connected to standby power generators.

The system is expected to handle around 2400 bags an hour, although its speed can be adjusted by zone to meet demand.

Although a successful test had been carried out in Melbourne last year using RFID tags, the technology was expensive and would not be introduced in Melbourne pending a much wider utilisation in major hubs by airlines and airports, Petrovic said.

Planning for the T2 outbound system began in 2007 but physical installation only got underway in January 2010. The surge in air travel following the improvement in the global economic outlook means the pressure is on to have the system in operation by November.

BCS manufacturing and assembly is based in Melbourne and in Suzhou, China. Whilst BCS does have specialist contract manufacturing partners, all engineering, assembly and quality control occurs within BCS factories.

As part of the baggage handling upgrade process, Melbourne was the first airport in the world to run beta versions of the BCS-developed Sym3 3D visualisation and control software. The software was also used in designing Gold Coast Airport’s low cost terminal redevelopment, where BCS last year completed a state-of-the-art baggage system in a mezzanine floor above the main terminal, thereby saving valuable floor space below.

Sym3 evolved from BCS’s Virtual Airport software package, which is designed to fast-track the design, commissioning and simulation of complex baggage handling systems in international airports.

“We can take full contextual 3D in the design stage and play with whatever scenario is required – controls, processes, ground handler numbers, passenger demographics and throughput etc – to ensure that the system delivers,” says Jerram.

BCS has now spun off a separate company for Sym3 and anticipates widespread use beyond airports in the automation and materials handling sectors.

 

Glidepath now global

Notwithstanding its dominant position at the time in Australia, 10 years ago Glidepath, also Auckland-based, decided to turn its focus from the Australian market to the US and South America.

“Being a private company there were only so many resources and there wasn’t as much work in Australia as there had been – we’d just done the new Qantas terminals in Sydney and Melbourne and another for Ansett in Sydney, and there weren’t many coming up,” says Rob Harvey, Glidepath’s general manager Australia and Asia.

“So (Chairman and owner) Sir Ken Stephens decided to make a big push across the Pacific and strategically, that has been fantastic.”

The company now operates from two fully integrated manufacturing facilities in Dallas and Auckland, and has subsidiary companies in Canada, Latin America, India, South Africa, China and Australia.

Retaining manufacturing inhouse allows Glidepath to focus on speed of delivery, and if necessary run seven days a week, 24 hours a day to get a system completed on schedule.

“We design it and we build it to meet the specific requirements of an individual job, and we’re ISO9001 compliant. A customer can be assured of a delivery date and knows it’s coming from our factory than from a variety of third-party sources,” Harvey says.

Glidepath is currently upgrading a cargo handling facility in Melbourne for Australian Air Express and has just completed baggage handling upgrades for Newcastle Airport and Qantas Domestic in Brisbane.

The company has also just signed off on the upgrade of a baggage system at Port Hedland Airport.

But it’s elsewhere that its major projects are located, with North America delivering about 50 per cent of the company’s NZ$100 million annual turnover in 2009.

The previous year saw the manufacturing capacity of the Dallas plant doubled to 40,000 square feet and corporate resources and capability bolstered to benefit from the Obama Administration’s investment incentives for infrastructure upgrades to meet homeland security requirements.

In 2009 Glidepath completed the installation of a baggage system at Reno-Tahoe International Airport and began work on a US$32 million contract to design, manufacture and install a new integrated baggage handling and security screening system at Nashville International Airport in Tennessee.

The company also won a US$21 million contract to supply a fully integrated baggage handling, sortation and explosive detection system at Lynden Pinding International Airport in the Bahamian capital of Nassau.

Due for completion in 2013, the project will initially see the supply of a 55-counter check-in with an 1800 bags/hour inline explosive detection system, bag-weight imaging and automated baggage sortation.

Stage 2 includes three inbound baggage claim systems and Stage 3 involves the fitout in a new International/Domestic terminal with 42 check-in counters and 3,200 linear feet of baggage handling, security and sortation systems equipment.

New baggage systems are being installed at seven separate airports in Peru, and systems have recently been completed at Iquique Airport in Chile and Maiden Saleh Airport in Saudi Arabia.

In Botswana, Glidepath are finishing a project at Sir Seretse Khama Airport and have started a project at Francistown. In South Africa they have just completed the design, manufacture and installation of an inline checked baggage screening system for the new King Shaka International Airport in Durban, where they have also won a multi-year operations and maintenance contract.

Glidepath say the entire Durban project, comprising 72 check-in desks and more than 2400 metres of multi-level conveyors capable of handling more than 3000 bags an hour, took 30 months to complete from design through to commissioning.

As with BCS, proprietary software plays a vital role in Glidepath design and operation.

GlideSort is a sortation and allocation control and baggage reconciliation system with interfaces to airport and airline networks, while GlideView provides operator control of Glidepath’s systems and access to critical data for later analysis.

GlideControl is the core control software, operating on any industry-standard PLC and providing automatic control and operation of all system components, 100 per cent baggage tracking accuracy, conveyor cascade and indexing control, detection of baggage jams, and interfaces to radio frequency and/or optical scanners.

 

Issues remain

Energy efficiency is identified by both BCS’s Jerram and Glidepath’s Harvey as a priority in both design and operation.

BCS is currently receiving funding from the New Zealand Government’s Foundation for Research Science and Technology for research into ‘green’ airport systems.

While security issues loom large in baggage systems design, additional checks continue to be applied to the approximately 20 million bags per year on international flights to or from Australia.

Unisys Australia is contracted until 2014 by the Board of Airline Representatives Australia to provide a baggage reconciliation system for the 44 international airlines operating from Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Cairns, Perth, Adelaide, Darwin and the Gold Coast airports.

The system helps member airlines collectively comply with the Aviation Security Act’s Triple A (account and authorise) regulations relating to baggage handling, which are mandated by the Federal government’s Office of Transport Security. When passengers check in, each bag receives a barcode which is then scanned and reconciled with a passenger record before it can be loaded onto the aircraft.

Because the airline has a record of the baggage loading order, bags can be quickly identified and recovered if passengers fail to board, preventing takeoff with a mismatch of passengers, crew and baggage.

According to a 2009 Unisys case study, existing baggage systems are, “filled with security gaps between multiple systems and between check-in and boarding processes”.

While BCS’ Jerram declined to comment on this statement, Glidepath’s Harvey described it as very broad brush, possibly applying to some systems at regional airports, but certainly not to the systems in place at major Australian airports.

Unisys maintains that its system also helps reduce the number of lost and mishandled bags. (Of the 25 million bags which went missing in the world’s airports in 2009, seven per cent went astray because of errors during loading or offloading while three per cent of bags were incorrectly tagged, according to luggage-tracking data from air transport IT specialist SITA.)

Marc Michel, BCS’ general manager of Services and Solutions, comments that whilst a reduction in misloaded bags is a by-product of the AAA process, in itself it does not prevent an aircraft departing without a passenger’s bag.

A major innovation in this area is the revolutionary domestic departures system launched by Air New Zealand in 2009 at Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington airports and more recently in Queenstown.

Under the new self service system, banks of up to 40 check-in kiosks have replaced the traditional check-in counters at each of the airports. The kiosks allow customers to check-in bags and print boarding passes and bag tags.

Passengers then proceed to a self-drop conveyor belt which transports their bag(s) airside where BCS Airflow software reconciles the passengers, bags and intended flight.

The software accepts or rejects bags for each flight based on certain business rules and directs further bag processing accordingly. All bags are traced through the baggage handling system by collecting information every step of the way. This information, including automatically-measured bag weights, is then relayed to Air New Zealand’s departure control system to ensure that passengers, bags, and flights are reconciled and correct.

The new process has already reduced peak queuing times from 10-15 minutes to less than two minutes, and Michel says that BCS is now working on similar initiatives with several major Australian airports and airlines.