From Runway to Real-Time: Connected Ground Support Equipment Provides Data on the Airport Ramp

Matthias: Thank you. So, I'm Matthias Moulinier, as you said. I'm the Vice President of Product and Customer Success. I've been with the company since day one, so for fifteen years now, starting out as an engineer. I grew up with the company as we developed our system, and I'm responsible for the product strategy, making sure our product fits the market and our customers' needs. I also manage the team that deploys and supports our customers day to day, making sure that all of the data we collect for them is useful and used in the best way.

Ruth: Matthias, airports are full of machines most of us regular passengers never even notice. How are airports changing as more and more of these vehicles get connected?

Matthias: That's a very good point. When we take a flight, most of us don't look out of the window, but it's the first thing I do now, looking at how GSE, ground support equipment, operates around the aircraft.

Matthias: Over the past few years, we've had a lot of questions from operators about what their drivers are doing with their equipment around an aircraft. An aircraft carries a lot of people, it's a very valuable, sensitive asset, and safety around the aircraft has become the most important subject for airlines and ground handling companies. They use our system to know who is driving, to know how people are driving equipment, but we're also making decisions for them. If someone isn't wearing their seatbelt, we can reduce the speed. If they enter a specific zone, we can also reduce the speed. We make sure employees are trained correctly, and if they're not, the system rejects them. So it's about making sure the right people are driving the right equipment for the right aircraft at the right time. That's the foundation of safety, and one of the foundations of the system.

Ruth: So what does Adveez actually do? Where do you sit in that picture?

Matthias: In that picture, I'd say we develop the full solution. We design the hardware, a box installed inside the equipment, wired in to collect information and data from sensors, and to know who's driving and operating the equipment, as I said. All of that data is sent to our cloud. We use SIM cards that work everywhere in the world and can switch from country to country, network to network.

Matthias: After that, the data goes into our backend, into our database, and we've also built a front-end platform that does two major things. One is real-time management: locating where equipment is, associating drivers with equipment, alerting if equipment is low on fuel or low on charge, which happens more and more as more equipment moves to electric. That's the day-to-day, live data. On top of that, we have the analysis side, where after weeks, months, or years of data, you can understand how your fleet is used, how it's used at one airport compared with Toulouse, compared with Paris, compared with London, compared with Berlin.

Matthias: That lets you get an overview of all your equipment and make decisions about reassigning it to the right airport, based on data. What we're giving the end user is data and analysis on how they operate. Ten, fifteen years ago, they were essentially blind, just looking out of the window and trying to work out where their equipment was, who was driving it,

Ruth: … who's that guy,

Matthias: … exactly. Why is somebody else driving my equipment who isn't even from my company? That's the kind of thing we're solving at airports today.

Ruth: So before Adveez, was this all done on paper, or how did that even work?

Matthias: It was paper-based, or it wasn't done at all. You have hundreds of these vehicles on the ramp, and there's no physical key like in your car.

Ruth: Oh.

Matthias: So anyone can jump on a piece of equipment and drive it. You could be from airline A,

Matthias:, and driving equipment that belongs to airline B. And if you have an accident, you don't tell anyone. You leave the equipment somewhere and hope nobody finds out you were driving it. Fifteen years ago, when we started, only a very small number of people at any airport actually had data on how their equipment was being used.

Ruth: So it all started with safety. You said every driver now has to scan a badge before they can even start the machine, since, as you said, there are no keys. Walk me through that. How does this work in the daily life of an airport employee?

Matthias: The first thing we built was access control. That was the first request from a ground handling company: “I want to make sure my equipment is only driven by my own employees.” So the first device we made was simple, you scan your badge, and if you're authorised, you can drive; if not, you can't. That was the basis of the system fifteen years ago.

Matthias: As we discussed and demonstrated the solution to other customers, we added GPS. We added sensors to detect harsh acceleration, harsh braking, harsh turning. We added sensors to collect state of charge and fuel level, and then the ability to reduce speed and to collect technical data from the assets. That's how it started, and how the system evolved.

Matthias: To come back to your question: large airlines and ground handling companies have HR software that tells them which type of equipment an employee is qualified to drive. They can enter that data manually into our platform, “Ruth can drive the de-icing truck, I can't”, or it can be linked automatically through an API. So as soon as someone completes new training and gets a new badge number with a valid date, they can automatically drive the new equipment.

Ruth: That's clever. And you also monitor seatbelts, correct?

Matthias: Yes, related to the same idea. Next time you're on a flight, look out of the window, you'll see people jump onto a piece of equipment, jump out, jump back in. It's a repetitive, day-to-day task for them.

Ruth: I'm scared now.

Matthias: What they often do is put the seatbelt behind their back and just climb over it, so the equipment registers the seatbelt as engaged and doesn't send a warning.

Matthias: What we do is collect data from the sensor and from the seat itself. If the seatbelt is shown as engaged before someone actually sits down, we keep the equipment in what we call “slow mode”, five kilometres per hour, or about three miles per hour, until they unbuckle and buckle up again in the correct sequence.

Ruth: That's clever.

Matthias: Humans always find a way.

Ruth: Always. Beyond safety, there's the fleet management side of things. How does real-time data help an airport actually run its vehicles better?

Matthias: Fleet management has two aspects. The first is knowing, in real time, which equipment you should use for a given aircraft. At any airport you'll have very small aircraft and wide-body aircraft crossing the Atlantic,

Matthias:, different sizes of aircraft need different sizes of equipment.

Ruth: Right, like the stairs. A smaller aircraft needs different stairs.

Matthias: Exactly. The pushback tug you use to push the aircraft back is also bigger for a bigger aircraft. Knowing in real time that you have a wide-body aircraft in front of you, and that you need equipment that's nearby rather than on the opposite side of the airport, is powerful, do I have the right equipment, and is it available? That's the real-time side of fleet management.

Matthias: The biggest value, though, is in analysing the data afterwards. Say you have fifty units of a certain type of equipment, when you look at the data the next day, you can see how many were in maintenance, how many were in use, how many were charging, and that tells you your available buffer of units. That buffer can look very different depending on the situation. Without data, people on the ramp often say, “we don't have enough equipment,” so operators buy more. With the data, we can often show that they actually have too much, so they don't need to reinvest as heavily, they have the numbers to support a decision like, “I have ten spare units, six should be enough to manage and cover any issue.” So instead of buying new equipment for the next airport, you can just transfer units across.

Ruth: Interesting, otherwise you end up with a lot of stuff standing around on the tarmac.

Matthias: Exactly. And airports themselves are pushing more and more pressure on ground operators to reduce and remove as much equipment as they can, because what airports want is more aircraft on the ground. To fit more aircraft, you need to remove as much ground support equipment as possible. It's something airport authorities are actively requesting too.

Ruth: We'll take a short break, stay with us, and we'll be back with our guest shortly.

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Ruth: Another factor that comes into the mix is probably seasons. There must be a difference between summer and winter, not just because summer is holiday season, but because of temperature and weather conditions too.

Matthias: Absolutely. That was actually one of our first big customers, a ground handling company in Europe. In the past, they were buying equipment for the summer season at Nice Airport, in the south of France, and doing the same for winter at Lyon, near the French Alps. Now they have the data to say, “I should just transfer five units from Lyon after winter to Nice, where I have more flights during summer,” and vice versa. So they don't need to invest as heavily in equipment overall.

Ruth: That's clever too. Airports are electrifying as well. What role does Adveez play once you add battery-powered vehicles into the mix?

Matthias: We support that in two ways. The first is knowing, in real time, the state of charge of your equipment, like the fuel gauge in your car. Sometimes drivers don't check the dashboard and run down to a critical charge level, and the equipment can get stuck somewhere. We can alert operators in real time: if charge drops below 30 per cent, we send an alert; if it drops to 20 per cent, we send a more urgent alert, and we can call the driver on the walkie-talkie to say, “be careful, your equipment is low on charge.”

Matthias: Alerts on low state of charge are important, but the other thing we're doing now is collecting data from the charger itself. Chargers are often shared across every company operating on the ramp, and it's the same problem: there are plenty of chargers, but nobody knows when a charge is finished, so someone should unplug the equipment to free up the charger for someone else. We collect data from the charger too, so we can tell if it isn't working, or if charging has finished, and let someone know so they can act and free up the space. The airport can also invoice the number of kilowatts delivered to whoever used the charger.

Matthias: Having data from both the GSE and the charger makes the whole system much more powerful for decision-making. Airport infrastructure is a real challenge, it takes time to add chargers, it takes time to do all of this. There's a kind of battle between airports and airlines on the ground: they want to be greener, they want more electric GSE, but the airport infrastructure isn't always there yet. So having the data here is important too, to make sure the right charger goes in the right location, and that GSE is plugged into chargers as efficiently as possible.

Ruth: Interesting, so it helps the airport as well when planning its infrastructure. It's a win-win for every player. As a layperson flyer, you don't always realise how many different companies and stakeholders are involved, the airport, the ground crew, and the airlines are all different companies. There are so many players moving around, all playing the same game in a sense, but from different teams.

Matthias: Exactly. And sometimes you have other players too, the maintenance teams. Sometimes they're part of the airline, sometimes they're not, which adds another layer of complexity. So when you have the data, it's easier to know what you can do and to make decisions based on it.

Ruth: In your opinion, what's the biggest challenge you're facing right now?

Matthias: Probably electrification, and the data that comes with it. We see it day to day, diesel equipment is moving away, and we have more and more electric equipment. But when you drive across France, sometimes, I had this experience myself a couple of weeks ago in summer, no chargers are available, so you have to wait. Charging time can be a real challenge too. So it's a challenge for us to make sure we collect the right data to help airlines and airports make the right investment decisions in new electric equipment.

Matthias: And you mentioned de-icing trucks earlier, making a big de-icing truck fully electric is a real challenge. There's more and more electric equipment coming onto the market, but it's difficult to make everything electric. That's the dream, of course, 100 per cent electric, and a lot of equipment already is, but it's a genuine challenge. Again, it comes back to making sure we have the data to help operators decide: do I need to change everything now, or can I wait two, three, five, ten years, until the airport infrastructure is ready, until our maintenance teams are ready, because the training is different too. It's been a trend for the past ten, fifteen years, but it's a big question for everybody right now.

Ruth: Is there anything on the horizon you're excited about that you can share already?

Matthias: I'd say autonomous GSE. We're seeing more and more prototypes and first products becoming available around airports. But coming back to safety, inside an airport environment, you have aircraft everywhere, and thousands of other pieces of ground support equipment on the ramp. So autonomous GSE has to work alongside everything that's already there. In fifty years, when everything might be autonomous, it could be easier.

Matthias: But right now it's about finding the balance, what can be autonomous, what can't, and making sure airports support that: having the infrastructure, and having ramp staff who are willing to accept the innovation. We know it's the future, and we're helping some customers use the data we collect to work out which part of what they do around an aircraft could become autonomous first. Is it pushing back the aircraft? Is it moving cargo from point A to point B? Is it approaching the aircraft with cargo? There are lots of small tasks that autonomous GSE could take on.

Matthias: That's what's coming around aircraft at airports over the next five to ten years.

Ruth: Exciting. You said you've been with the company from the start, for over fifteen years. Is there anything on this journey that has surprised you, or a funny anecdote you'd like to share before we close?

Matthias: A funny one, this airport world is very small. People working for airlines or for equipment manufacturers tend to jump from one company to another but stay in the same industry. I fly a lot to North America, the Middle East, and Asia, mostly America, and we usually stay at an airport hotel and never really see the city. Family and friends ask, “You were there, there, there, what did you see?” And the answer is, “I saw the airport, that's all I saw.” The funny thing is, you think you'll be eating alone at the restaurant, and then you run into someone who was meeting the very same customer as you, the day before or the day after. It's happened a few times, you expect to be alone, and you end up with someone else from the same industry. It's a funny industry to work in.

Ruth: What's your favourite airport?

Matthias: Good question. I'd say Atlanta, probably one of the best-organised airports out there. For the nicest airports, I'd say Singapore and Doha.

Ruth: With the jungle and the forest in the middle?

Matthias: Exactly.

Ruth: That is very nice. For some reason, I still like Amsterdam, even though it can be the ninth ring of hell. I kind of enjoy the chaos of Amsterdam, it just works out in the end, somehow. I don't know how they do it.

Matthias: Yeah, the Toulouse–Amsterdam flight is always on a small aircraft. When it arrives, you always load and unload passengers by bus, which I don't love.

Ruth: Again.

Matthias: You just want to get off, and instead, “ah, I have to take a bus.”

Ruth: There are huge airports, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Doha, and small ones, like Kilimanjaro or Bali. Does size matter? How many assets can you track, and how big is Adveez's operation?

Matthias: It doesn't really matter how big the airport is. What we see is that the bigger the airport, the sooner you'll get a strong return on investment from the data, because the bigger the airport, the more GSE they have, and sometimes it turns out they have too much. At a small airport, the effect is more limited, but the system can work everywhere.

Matthias: Our biggest airports, with our biggest airline customers, have up to two thousand pieces of equipment on a single site, mostly the big hubs in North America and Europe. In total, we've just crossed more than thirty-two thousand pieces of equipment tracked across more than two hundred and eighty airports worldwide. That's where we are today.

Ruth: That's terrific, you must learn a lot from that data.

Matthias: We do. What's interesting now is that, with data from so many different customers, we're starting to build anonymised benchmarks, so operators can compare themselves to the industry. We take all of the data across airlines and say, “here's how you compare, here's where you're ahead of the industry, here's where you're not.” Having that volume of data now lets us compare across countries and weather conditions too, some figures turn out to be completely different depending on where you are.

Ruth: Interesting. If you had to put together a soundtrack for this episode, what song would you put on it?

Matthias: I'm a big fan of Mumford & Sons. Trying to think which one I like best, probably “Little Lion Man.” I don't know if you know it, but,…

Ruth: I probably do, I don't know the title off the top of my head, but I think I know Mumford & Sons too. Great. Thank you so much, Matthias, for taking us onto the tarmac and showing us how data keeps airport vehicles safe and moving. It was really insightful, thank you for sharing your expertise with us.

Matthias: Thank you very much, Ruth, and thanks to We Talk IoT for having me today.

Ruth: It was a pleasure. Thank you for listening to We Talk IoT: stay curious and keep innovating. This was Avnet Silica's We Talk IoT. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating. Talk to you soon.