Sydney Airport goes big on data
SYDNEY Airport is using big data and analytics to predict traveller flows around airport choke points such as customs and security barriers.
“We handle an AFL grand final crowd every day,” said Mark Tyler, Sydney Airport’s customer intelligence and analytics manager.
“That’s up to 100,000 people per day,” said Mr Tyler, who was speaking at the CeBIT Australia 2014 show at Sydney Olympic Park.
“What we can predict is that customers on certain airline carriers like certain products and they park at certain airports. Sounds really basic but proving it wasn’t. Then we went back through regression analysis and proved the size of those. So how many passengers per 500 would use X car park to Y car park,” he said.
Sifting the data has allowed the airport to tweak its product offerings around valet parking and launch the Blue Emu budget car park.
The next step, according to Mr Tyler, is being able to predict customer flows around the airport and help operations like customs and security to better manage staffing.
“We can start predicting what type of resource modelling will be needed at different customer presentation points across the airport. At the moment that’s a bit of a Holy Grail we are targeting. Trying to get that information is interesting because some passengers might present to check-in an hour to an hour and a half before an international flight while others might get there much earlier.”
“It’s really interesting but brain teasing,” he said.
Applications based on the latest wave of big data studies would follow, said Mr Tyler. The airport uses IBM’s Cognos business intelligence software and has a network of people counters, WiFi access points and Bluetooth censors monitoring customer traffic and dwell times as well as check-in and car parking information.
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