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Getting to the airport, passing through security, picking up your luggage and arriving at your final destination can take time, turning a short 90-minute flight into a five-hour-plus journey door-to-door. To address this, the EU-funded DORA project has developed a comprehensive real time route planner that begins from your point of departure, offering advice on the fastest way of getting to the airport.
Having taken into account the road traffic conditions and transport options, the journey planner app continues to guide you inside the airport itself, providing real-time information on potential time-saving factors such as security queue waiting times, elevator services (for those with mobility issues) and departure gates.
Once at his or her destination, the passenger is guided to the luggage belt and given advice on transport options to their final destination. “If the average air travel time for a Europe air passenger is, for example, five hours, we wanted to find a way of cutting this down to four,” explains project coordinator Halid Hrasnica from Eurescom, Germany.
More efficient travel will benefit all passengers, whether they are business travellers with limited time or families on vacation wanting to avoid huge delays and long queues. Furthermore, airports will benefit from being able to ensure a smooth transit for customers. “We have also seen interest in this innovation from airlines, which could integrate this kind of application into their own website,” says Hrasnica. “This could then be offered to passengers as a kind of additional service.”
Practical advice on hand
The project team gathered a huge amount of information on various transport modes and airport facilities in order to develop this tool. This then had to be integrated. “The next step was making this information presentable and usable for passengers,” says Hrasnica. “For this we created a standard web interface that can be used at home to begin planning the journey, and we then developed a smartphone app for on-the-go use.”
In addition to the smartphone app, project partners also developed a smartwatch app. “More and more people are wearing these,” Hrasnica points out. “We also felt that this was a useful test case for a smartwatch app, because if you have lots of luggage or kids to look after at the airport, a smartwatch might be a convenient device to use.”
Going live
Trials of the technology have already begun between Berlin and Palma de Mallorca. Localisation equipment has been installed in the airports, and in principal the system is up and running. Passengers will be encouraged to download the app, use it and provide the project team with valuable feedback.
“We made sure to design the route planner in a generic way, too, so that the technology can be transferred to other regions at a later stage,” says Hrasnica. “The DORA system can also be integrated with other systems and networks. In this way, we’ve tried to make sure that our work is fully sustainable and can be built upon.”
Although too early to say whether the DORA system could be a viable standalone solution for more efficient travel, Hrasnica is confident that the project will demonstrate how technology can be used to address this challenge. “We have definitely opened up new possibilities,” he says. “We will be interested to see how it works in practice, and I can also see this routing technology being applied for use in other complex buildings.”