Airport Operational Database (AODB)

As the global demand for air travel increases, airports are looking at how they can improve their processes to manage growth. Reliable, accurate, timely and comprehensive data – be it about flights, passengers and baggage, systems and equipment - is critical to your airport’s operations, and how efficiently you manage this information is key to your airport’s operational excellence.  

As the central repository of all flight information, the Airport Systems AODB is at the heart of your airport and provides all airport stakeholders with accurate and timely flight data that allows better decision making and impacts airport performance.  

Solution Overview 

Airport Systems AODB is A-CDM enabled, and brings your airport a step closer to achieving the A-CDM vision. A-CDM aims at improving the overall efficiency of airport operations by optimizing the use of resources and improving the predictability of events. It focuses especially on aircraft turnaround and pre-departure sequencing processes which moves an airport into Total Airport Management.  Increased predictability can significantly improve all major airport and network operations; it raises both productivity and cost-efficiency. 

Airport Systems AODB intelligently governs seasonal, historic and live operational flight schedules and supports industry standard data sets, including IATA and ICAO airline and airport codes; aircraft types and irregularity codes; and airport standard reference data such as terminalIDs, gates and stand numbers, check-in desks and baggage carousels. 

With powerful automatic database processing capabilities, your airport operations team can enforce business rules for all your standard airport processes. Complex flight handling, such as managing and operating code share flights as well as inbound to outbound flight linkage, is handled reliably and efficiently.

Features

• Intelligently manage seasonal flight schedule, supporting inputs from multiple sources 
  • The Seasonal Flight Schedule automatically generates a new Current Flight Schedule for the configurable next new day within the operational flight window, by comparing the validity dates of the seasonal flight record with the current operational window.   
  • Users can maintain the data directly, for example, to provide additional local data to the standard schedule data, such as code share and link/turn information or add or delete records. 
• Securely generate the Daily Flight Operations plan, with inputs from multiple sources 
  • Easily control the timeframe for generating these plans through a window that contains a daily plan for each day within the operational flight window.  
  • Define the operational period and time windows, e.g. seven days in advance and one-week aggregation. Security features built-in prevents unauthorized users or external systems from creating flights and prevents one user group or organization creating flights belonging to another user group or organization. 
• Manage flight updates  
  • Receive and process updates to the operational flight records from various external systems. Airport or airline staff can directly update via the Airport Systems AODB Flight Handler GUI client or the web-based clients. 
  • Authorized users can design their own automatic updates. E.g. displays, such as 'Go to gate' 30 minutes before departure or raising an alarm to the operations user if a flight arrives and no reclaim carousel has been assigned.  
  • Airport Systems AODB is supplied with an established set of flight processing rules as standard but additional rules may be configured to accommodate additional requirements of the airport. 
• Archiving 
  • Copy flight data from the active flight records to separate historical tables as it expires out of the current flight window  
  • Replicate tables out to a separate archive for easy reporting and analysis 
  • Easy storage of archived data for a configurable period, usually a year  
  • Retrieve and recover online historical data anytime

Benefits  

With continuing growth in aircraft movements and passenger travel, airports need to optimize and increase airport capacity to succeed. The Airport Systems AODB is a single repository of accurate information that an airport can trust to run its business.  

Other benefits:  

• Improved control and management efficiency in airport operations - scheduling and ‘what if’ scenario simulations provide support for all operational flight planning and management processes  
• Airports can build on the systems and processes required to achieve A-CDM compliancy according to EUROCONTROL definition. This means better predictability and turnaround efficiency for the airport and improved customer satisfaction. 
• Provides a single area to work within and user-friendly, intuitive interface means easier and quicker adoption of the system by users for better productivity 
• Proactive control of real-time operations by predicting events, automatic triggering of tasks and real-time intelligence for timely decision-making. Increases visibility for planning and operations, including accurate schedule information and passenger forecasts 
• Integrates and simplifies infrastructure and data, facilitating collaboration with all internal and/or external airport’s stakeholders