FUSION AIMS is a real-time airport information management system, designed to improve the efficiency, customer service, and on-time performance of the aviation industry.
Developed by Industrial Technology Systems Ltd,
the FUSION AIMS system reliably gathers real-time data and presents the data in a variety of formats including tables, graphs and diagrams. The system presents the real-time status of equipment, passenger flows, and conditions in a dashboard format, allows management personnel to analyse data carry out current historical performance comparisons
The airport information management system is flexible and can be integrated to monitor a wide range of passenger sensitive equipment br>
i.e. lifts, escalators, conveyors, baggage handling systems, as well as passenger queue lengths, baggage counts, flow rates, the use and availability of check in desks, conditions e.g. temperature and humidity.
FUSION AIMS can gather data for the entire airport, individual terminals, check in areas, individual desks, airlines or handling agents. Using FUSION AIMS an airport’s performance can be monitored against Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and alerts can be raised when 
they are at risk of not being achieved.
Benefits
The FUSION airport information management system delivers the following impressive benefits to the aviation industry:
- Cost savings through equipment performance and maintenance improvements and the minimisation of third party fines
- Increased management availability to spend on other improvement activities as the system automatically collects the data and produces real-time reports
- Increased asset efficiency by monitoring the equipment status, and providing automatic alerts i.e. SMS, on-screen alerts and emails if problems arise
- Improved equipment maintenance as the system supplies timely accurate information enabling the management team to plan maintenance activities more effectively, based on equipment usage, condition and threshold
- Improved service standards through increases in the availability of passenger sensitive equipment e.g. lifts, escalators and travalators, faster repair times through increased visibility and the introduction of reliable, automatic alerts, if problems occur
The Solution
FUSION AIMS is based on two key products: a data historian and ITS’ FUSION reporting tool. The data historian is used to perform the following functions:
- To read and manipulate equipment status from the existing data collection systems
- To store information in a data historian, designed for fast retrieval
- To buffer data so that process information is not lost if the main server is down or the network is unavailable
FUSION reporting, an Intranet-based tool is designed to present historical data via Microsoft Internet Explorer and offers the following key features:
- Time based - the system can show both current and historical data
- Graphical and tabular reports
- Zero footprint - the system can be used on-site with a locked-down desktop
- Controlled manual data entry
FUSION AIMS resides on a Windows Server and reliably collects and stores data from thousands of items. Data from any OPC-compliant system can be acquired and stored.
FUSION reporting’s zero footprint deployment offers several major benefits:
- No ongoing maintenance costs
- Easy control over new versions or interface changes
- A more secure target device
- Isolates the user from the airport control equipment
FUSION AIMS is fully configurable to suit the user’s needs, with the ability to include custom logos, help files and colour schemes.
Because AIMS is a time-aware system, the user can view reports and act on incidents as they occur to limit impact on the airport and prevent further problems. FUSION AIMS can also be configured to alert appropriate users when specific circumstances arise.
Reports
The FUSION airport management system can produce a wide range of reports including, but not limited to:
Equipment Availability
- Equipment uptime as a percentage of core hours, against a specified target KPI
Baggage Throughput
- Real-time or historical baggage throughput – recording data every five minutes, hourly, daily etc
- When used with other sources of data across a common timeline, it can highlight cause and effect following equipment incidents
Number of Bags per Desk
- Monitor desk throughput and compliance
- Perform monthly and daily comparisons
- Features the ability to drill down by day and can be used for future operations planning
Chute Full Measures
- Baggage throughput per chute
- Monitor chute usage
- Handling Agent performance
Sorter Re-circulations
- Number of bags re-circulating per minute
- Identify sorter problems and measure impact of re-circulations on the overall end-to-end process
- Helps to manage the system more effectively and reduce future die back
Top Ten Faults by Duration and Occurrence
- Monitors the most frequent and highest impact faults across the system
- Helps to target and plan maintenance and fault fixing activities
