Jul 2020
In a short period of time, airports around the world experienced the hardest hit due to travel bans and restrictions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. With international traffic generally being restricted to repatriation flights and cargo, operations have been heavily disrupted or completely halted and most airport halls are nearly empty. Smart Technologies will play a major role to support airlines and airports to overcome the crisis, which is likely to accelerate the adoption of automation and artificial intelligence in the aviation sector.
Artificial Intelligence in Modern Aviation
Artificial Intelligence has transformed modern aviation, with a particular focus on its impact in airports. AI is streamlining passenger check-ins, security processes, and baggage handling, making air travel more efficient and convenient. It helps optimize runway traffic, reduce delays, and enhances safety with advanced surveillance systems. Furthermore, AI-driven customer service and personalized experiences are making airports more passenger-friendly, ensuring that the future of air travel is smarter and more enjoyable.
What is Artificial Intelligence? A Brief Introduction
Artificial Intelligence, often abbreviated as AI, is like a super-smart computer program that can think and learn on its own. It's designed to mimic the human brain's problem-solving abilities. AI can do all sorts of stuff, like recognizing pictures, understanding speech, and making decisions. It learns from data, which means the more information it gets, the better it gets at its tasks.
AI refers to a broad class of systems that enable machines to mimic advanced human capabilities. AI use cases exist across every industry and some of the most prevalent today include:
- Image recognition
- Video classification
- Speech-to-text
- Natural language processing
- Recommendation systems
- Tabular and time-series data applications
Misconceptions About AI in the Public Eye
When most people hear the term artificial intelligence, the first thing they usually think of is robots.In fact, Artificial intelligence is a constellation of many different technologies working together to enable machines to sense, comprehend, act and learn with human-like levels of intelligence. Technologies like machine learning and natural language processing are all part of the AI landscape. Each one is evolving along its own path and when applied in combination with data, analytics and automation can help businesses achieve their goals.
Innovative AI Applications Transforming Today's Airports
In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force across various industries, offering cost-effective solutions to boost productivity, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. Now, airports worldwide are harnessing the power of AI, machine learning, algorithms, and other cutting-edge technologies to provide tailored services, elevate the passenger experience, and optimize operational processes.
The airport of the future promises a seamless end-to-end journey, where touch-free identity checks enhance both security and passenger satisfaction. AI is driving a multitude of advancements within airports, including self-service kiosks, AI-powered facial recognition systems, AI chatbots, and streamlined security checkpoints. It's also reducing passenger wait times and enhancing safety through the use of thermal cameras and real-time translation devices.
With its exceptional data processing capabilities and task streamlining prowess, AI is rapidly gaining ground in airport operations. It's not just about convenience but also about making air travel safer and more efficient than ever before. Here are some examples;
Recommendation Engine for Revenue Management
One of the ways artificial intelligence is used at airports is in the recommendation engines. Recommendation engines are common in popular online services from Netflix to Amazon and you will find them in countless travel-booking providers as well. The AI platform analyzes historical data of the passenger like past reservations, behavior-tracking techniques, metadata, purchase history and real-time data to highly personalized offers to passengers, increasing retention and a customer’s lifetime value.
Enhancing Passenger Experience with AI Chatbots
Bots can direct users to specific services or outlets, provide flight information updates and more, freeing up staff to focus on activities that are more valuable and reducing human contact. Chatbots and customer service automation is human-like, understands simple questions and responds in a casual, conversational style. Using chatbots, airports can provide 24/7 customer assistance and reduce human contact.
Easy Baggage Screening
Passenger checked baggage is screened more efficiently using an Artificial Intelligence-based, robotic assisted convenience system, which quickly troubleshoots and diverts high-risk baggage for deeper inspection. Today’s AI-powered facial recognition solutions for live video give insights into how individuals are moving through the space and enable much faster access.
Improving Security: Facial Recognition and Thermal Cameras
Facial recognition and fever detector AI Thermal cameras used for detecting passenger with fever.
AI-based video analytics uses algorithms and computer vision technology to look at video feeds, commonly taken from cameras to detect patterns and trends. The analysis happens in real-time and delivers actionable intelligence such as crowd gathering, people’s emotions and behaviors, general heat mapping, etc.
TAV Technologies: Leading the AI Revolution in Airport Solutions
As consumers become more familiar with high level of customization gained through AI, other businesses are faced with the challenge to offer similar experiences for shoppers across channels.
TAV's AI-Powered Pre-Order System: Personalized Recommendations
TAV Technologies AI-Powered Pre-Order is a powerful product recommendation solution that creates intelligent upselling and cross-selling product recommendations based on retailer product inventory and passengers’ behaviors.
With Pre-Order, you can automatically promote, weight and filter product recommendations throughout the passenger journey, all from an intuitive interface. TAV Technologies powerful product collect all valuable customer data, order history and traffic information saved by the app from the login stage to the sale point and with certain algorithms, it processes and analyzes those data to learn about passenger’s needs and trends. It helps businesses to provide customized services, intelligent promotions that encourage higher-order values and increased revenue which simultaneously drives passenger satisfaction and loyalty.
Pre-Order helps passengers discover items they will love, reduce abandonment and save their valuable time with its prediction capabilities, which also enables suggestions for passengers more relevant to their choices and interests. It tempts passengers and urges them to buy the products or services, thereby helping businesses better engage with customers and grow sales.
Predicting Flight Delays with AI-Based Algorithm
Dealing with flight delays and cancellations can be incredibly frustrating and stressful for passengers. The impact of flight delays, however, extends beyond the inconvenience faced by travelers. It affects cargo logistics, airport operations, and even has economic repercussions.
TAV Technologies has introduced a cutting-edge solution: Flight Delay Prediction Algorithm. Powered by AI and machine learning, this technology leverages historical operational data to forecast potential flight delays. By employing this Flight Delay Prediction system, airports can proactively anticipate disruptions and adjust their resource allocation and planning to minimize the impact on travelers, ultimately offering an improved customer experience.
Modern airports are at the forefront of adopting these new technologies to address security concerns, ensure social distancing, enhance operational efficiency, and elevate the overall customer experience. The shift toward increased automation is evident, with robotic assistants helping passengers access essential information and artificial intelligence streamlining processes for greater efficiency.
The results are promising so far. These innovations are significantly reducing waiting times, strengthening security measures, and creating a more seamless and enjoyable experience for airport customers.
In conclusion, the aviation industry is experiencing a remarkable transformation driven by the integration of Artificial Intelligence and advanced technologies. As airports continue to embrace automation, AI, and robotics, we can look forward to a future where the journey through the skies is not only more intelligent but also more enjoyable