Losing your luggage at the airport turns dream vacations into nightmares. Wouldn’t it be nice to arrive in the same location – and at the same time – as your bag?
A new testbed developed by the Industrial Internet Consortium, a nonprofit, is geared toward using technology to reduce the number of lost or stolen bags.
Airlines have new requirements set out by the International Air Transport Association by way of Resolution 753, which requires them to implement more comprehensive baggage-handling solutions by June 2018.
Six to seven bags are lost for every 1,000 handled in the U.S., meaning more than 23 million bags are mishandled annually, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. The average airline pays $100 to repatriate a delayed bag, and the risk exposure per bag can run as much as $3,300. The economic impact is expected to grow as air traveler numbers are poised to double over the next 20 years.
The testbed participants, which include General Electric, M2Mi, and Oracle, are developing a system to track a bag from check-in to delivery using RFID tags and a range of wireless devices to associate luggage with passengers and flights. The bags are tracked through GPS in real time and generate alerts in the event a bag is located in an improper place or if there is a weight change in the bag.
GE is contributing its Predix platform based on Cloud Foundry to host the platform side of the system, and Oracle will provide apps built on its Oracle Airline Data Model, Oracle BI and Oracle CX. M2Mi will provide the M2M and IoT device management, data handling, and instream analytics to connect edge devices to the platform apps. Software developer Altoros, which announced plans to join the team Tuesday, will help develop RFID-based baggage tracking.
“Platforms like Predix and Cloud Foundry are making a revolutionary shift in how fast software is built, tested, deployed, and scaled,” said Elena Travkina, IoT practice lead at Altoros. “As a result, some critical problems in various industries can also be solved faster. We are very enthusiastic about helping this initiative grow – providing our Predix and microservices expertise.”
Filed Under: M2M (machine to machine)
