APOC will significantly cut down the time passengers spend in queues at the airport: WAISL CEO Rishi Mehta

What is the Airport Operations Command Center (APOC) and how will it change the air travel experience for the passengers? 

WAISL is an end-to-end technology and IT partner to the airport ecosystem. We bring in all the technology that goes into the airport, from CCTV cameras, flight information display systems, wifi routers, baggage handling and so on. We also manage it 24/7. Airport Operations Command Center is an integrated centre where you can monitor the entire airport. Importantly, APOC anticipates the problem instead of only reacting to it when it happens. To do this, we collect data from various 30 to 40 touchpoints at the airport- like Digiyatra, CCTVs, IOT sensors which are spread across. This helps us to predict and anticipate the possible bottlenecks. This information can help the various stakeholders who work at the airport from security personnel to ground handlers to prepare ahead. APOC will basically bring the stakeholders from the air side, terminal side and kerbside together to provide a holistic solution.  

What is APOC’s role beyond predicting the passenger traffic flow?

Predicting passenger traffic flows is just one of the 125 KPI (key performance indicators) that the APOC does. For example – we look at resource management. Airports have to operate very efficiently, which simply means that it has to process many passengers in a given period of time. To do that, it has to do a turn around of the aircraft in a very short period of time to save fuel and manpower. With APOC’s simulation models help here- we can easily see what traffic may come like, which airline is coming at what time, what gate they need to be assigned to and so on. With APOC you are not only managing the terminal, you are also looking at the kerb side to plan for better movement of traffic to avoid congestion. It will significantly cut down the time that travellers spend at the check-in and security queues. APOC can ensure that travellers are kept in loop in real-time with timely alerts. 

What is Amazon Web Services role in this entire exercise?

So far we had deployed the solution on premises. Airports are regulated entities which want the data to stay in the same data centre. Now, basically, we are able to move a significant amount of data to the cloud. Which is where AWS comes in. It is significant, because cloud computing offers me higher scale and efficiency. In the cloud even if one zone was to go down, the other would take on seamlessly. This ensures that APOC is available 24 by 7.

When is the system launching in India and which airport?

We have rolled it out at one of the Tier 1 South Indian airports. It is live, but the public announcement will come in a few days when it is officially inaugurated. Till then we cannot reveal the name of the airport.