Working for more than 15 years with IT systems in airport operations I pretty much experienced most areas from development, testing, system integration, documentation, training and project management. I spend many years on and with a classic client-server based system, partially with legacy technology, and designed and built an AODB from the scratch in new technology and deployed it to the cloud. Two topics drew my attention particularly in the last few years, the “AODB in the Cloud” and “AODB and Big Data”, I like to review them in some short articles here. This talk is politics-free and does not refer to specific products or companies.
For the reader without airport operational background my elevator speech description for AODB. (Did you notice ? there is no entry in Wikipedia for AODB.)
AODB – Aiport Operational Database
An AODB system is usually the core IT system to support the airport ground operations, it integrates with various systems from the heterogeneous IT landscape found at the airport, compiling data from airlines flights schedules, flight plan management, communication between airlines and airports to building management systems, live ground movements and many more systems.
It serves as platform for CDM (Collaborative Decision Making) for the various parties forming the airport community, from airport operators, airlines, groundhandling agents to ATC (Air Traffic Control).
It handles seasonal and operational flights by providing both real-time and historical data, supports resource management for facilities and equipment, as well for staff, it is an information portal.
The AODB itself can be reduced to a simple 3-tier piece architecture, a database, business logic processing layer and a frontend.
It can be complemented by ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), BI (Business Intelligence) and other components.
Unlike consumer (software) products, this is rather a niche market, and AODB systems are offered only by a couple of companies. To name a few (in alphabetical order):
Amadeus, Arinc, T-Systems, IBS, Inform, Intersystems, ISO, Ultra,.. I leave it to the reader to find out more about these companies and their products.
I like to discuss in the next few blog entries the following topics triggered by the technical and operational evolution AODB systems are going through.
- The AODB in the Cloud – Are airports ready for it ?
- Is AODB data “Big Data” ?
- Airport AODB goes NoSQL (Part 1)
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