Houston Airport System Case Study

Challenge

HAS needed real-time insights into airport performance, such as aircraft taxi times, arrival and departure rates, reasons for delays, incidents, and carrier specific information. With this treasure trove of new data assets, Houston Airport System required an innovative solution suited for advanced analytics.

Solution

iOLAP architected a secure and scalable solution on the AWS platform for processing and integrating large amounts of data from disparate sources.

• Flight Information Data is sourced by a real-time broadcast from Federal Aviation Administration’s Next Generation Air Transportation System. Using API and a custom-made publisher running on EC2, iOLAP listens to the broadcast feed and publishes data to the S3 Data Lake through Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose streaming service. Data is being ingested and processed into Amazon Redshift for real time analytics using an ELT Framework based on AWS Step Functions and AWS Lambda functions.
• Parking Occupancy, Enplanement, Human Resource, Revenue and Statistics data is delivered to the S3 bucket location throughout the day or week. As soon as a fresh dataset is available and uploaded, it triggers an event-driven ingestion process into Amazon Redshift. Data is further processed using an ELT Framework based on AWS Step Functions and AWS Lambda functions.

iOLAP is also integrating data with Enterprise Voice, a proprietary data to voice service, thus delivering a natural interface for data queries that can be accessed by a mobile airport management team.

Project Start and End Date

November 2017 – November 2018

The Benefits

With their AWS based solution, HAS is able to perform near real-time tracking of flights and their effects on daily operations. This enhances the traveler satisfaction KPIs to maintain their 5-star global air service gateway rating, and attracts travelers and airlines. The solution also allows HAS to associate revenue generation with gate usage and enplanements providing visibility into the seasonality and variability in travel patterns, as well as allowing the airport to anticipate future revenue opportunities or challenges.

About the Partner

iOLAP, Inc. is a big-data and advanced-analytics consultancy operating at the forefront of technology for more than two decades. With a client-centric and business-outcome perspective, we are completely focused on data technologies to create solutions that bring efficiencies, security, and scale to their clients. iOLAP evaluates every client’s unique needs before recommending architectures and technologies. We have selectively partnered with leaders in the space based on two (2) simple criteria: Capability & Usability.

Next Step

To learn more about how AWS can help you manage your big data solution, visit the AWS Big Data Analytics details page.