Digital Transformation in Passenger Processing at a Glance: Before And After COVID-19 Crisis
In this article authors review “Industry 4.0” approach in its application to airport industry, analyze current status and roadblocks on their way to match with Airport 4.0 framework developed by Arthur D. Little 2015 study.
Digital Transformation priorities were initially incepted before COVID-19 crisis. In current circumstances, authors just can’t ignore COVID-19 game changing factors. There is an analysis of COVID-19 crisis nature on Russian airports in short and medium term prospective and its impact on Passenger dynamics as key airport development KPI.
Airport 4.0 status means that it should be digitally enabled in 6 key clusters: «Passenger Management and Flow Monitoring», « Process Automation», «Collaborative Decision Making», «Intelligent Business Management», «Customer Engagement», «Predictive Solutions». We believe that an airport enabled in all 6 technology clusters is a kind of ‘ideal type’, which should not hinder an airport from picking relevant clusters to set these as Strategic Directions in Digital Transformation Journey.
In authors’ view, COVID-19 crisis which caused unprecedented disruption of air travel may play a trigger role to speed up passenger processing innovations according to the new imperatives to provide continuous social distancing.
In this article, we analyzed key priorities and changes in passenger processing with regard to what kind of data is required to process passengers in changed conditions and why passenger processing domain gains even greater importance and should be considered a key step in Airport’s Digital Transformation.
We included certain recommendations that should help Airports’ Management and Investors to make informed decisions on how to plan Airport Infrastructure development, Passenger Traffic Recovery and apply Airport 4.0 vision as a destination for the Airport Digital Transformation Journey.
Sources:
1. IATA. Social distancing would make most airlines financially unviable, 2020
https://www.iata.org/en/iata-repository/publications/economic-reports/social-distancing-would-make-most-airlines-financially-unviable/
2. Industry 4.0, Wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_4.0
3. Arthur D. Little. Impact of Digital on Airport Business Model
https://www.adlittle.com/sites/default/files/viewpoints/2015-05-Arthur_D_Little_T_T-Impact_of_Digital_on_Airport_Business_Model.pdf
4. Russian Federation Ministry of Transport Order №7 from 14.01.2019
http://www.consultant.ru/document/cons_doc_LAW_318100/2ff7a8c72de3994f30496a0ccbb1ddafdaddf518/
5. IATA. One ID Concept
https://www.iata.org/en/programs/passenger/one-id/