Airport Munich

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The Project

The host computer of the luggage claim in terminal 1 of the airport met its limit after 10 years on duty. It cannot comply with the requirements of the load and the speed of data handling any more. Besides neither the operation nor the optical characteristics are conform to the state of the art.

Therefore not only the hardware should be modernized. All applications should also be regenerated. Beside the adoption of approved tools from the “old” software there also have to be integrated requests for modifications and amplifications into the new software of the host computer. For example, additional dialogues should facilitate modifications of flight dates while scheduling.

The host computer is responsible for the temporal coordination of the luggage transport between the Check In and the dropping of the luggage on the end box. The luggage will then be transported from the end box to the airplane. Therefore the replacement has to be handled during the current operation.

The starting up and the tests of the new host computer can only take place during the flight-free-time which means that there is only a daily time frame from 0.00 AM up to 3.00 AM available.

Integrated Components

The required hardware has been specified together with the client and also provided by the responsible department of the airport.

In order to be able to abstain from the application of several redundant computers the airport as well as Aberle goes for a virtualisation solution. Therefore the client provides a bundle of 8 computers in total. This bundle is divided into 2 clusters with 4 computers each. For the process of the host computer and for the Oracle database one computer respectively is going to be attached in virtual ambience
within these clusters.

The solution

Aberle Automation has a long-time experience in the area of material flow computers concerning the realisation of the application and of the processing. All user dialogues will be adapted on the active airport standards. So that the user will get along intuitively at once. In order to keep the phase of changing as short as possible, the optic and the handling of several dialogues will be carried over by the “old” application.

Real operation: As the flight traffic may not be interfered during the starting up of the new host computer the starting up has to be handled during the night from 0.00 AM until 3.00 AM.

The reorganisation from the old to the new host computer takes place after the check of the last airplane at 0.00 AM. After about one hour the actual flight dates will be transferred to the new host computer. The backslide steps for any emergency defined before the reorganisation, do not have any effect.

The advantages

The new hardware is designed for the future which means that with the current flight and data amount the maximum processor demand is only by 30 %. If this should be too demanding it will be possible to activate an additional processor core for the handling of the virtual environment by the virtualisation.

Due to the virtualisation the clarity and the maintainability of the host computer application will be improved extensively and the whole maintenance process will be
optimized.

With the complete modernisation of the host computer application the operating interface is adapted to today’s pc standard. During the creation of the software the design of the user dialogues is going to be retained as far as possible. As usual the user will be able to work with the new software immediately. Delays or orientation phases do not exist. Therefore it is assured that the changeover of the
operation to the new System will run smoothly.

 

Downloads

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