airports

Build resilient systems— gift a memorable airport experience to your flyers this holiday season

insight
November 19, 2024
9 min read

Operating an airport requires the coordination of thousands of employees, hundreds of flight schedules and multiple airlines that rely on a complex network of software systems to ensure seamless, on-time operations and an exceptional passenger experience.

Ensuring that the systems are resilient isn't just about reliability, but also about protecting against unavoidable disruptions.
But what happens when these systems falter? Considering a minor scenario, impactful issues like an API failing to respond timely, or latency in the airport network.  Such issues within the Common Use Passenger Processing System (CUPPS) can interrupt routine processes such as boarding pass generation or network connectivity. These interruptions may seem small, but they cause:

  • Bottlenecks at check-in and boarding
  • Causing frustrating delays
  • Flight disruptions

 

For the engineering support team, these seemingly small issues escalate quickly, and regulatory compliance risks come into play.

But can we afford a failure of the predictive analytics system linked to the Airport Operational Database (AODB), which uses IoT sensors to monitor baggage belt wear and tear? If this system goes down, undetected belt wear could lead to baggage handling breakdowns. That means:

  • Delayed baggage delivery
  • Missed passenger connections
  • A massive luggage backlog

 

Such complex problems cost airports millions in operating losses and at the same time affect the travelling experience of thousands.

Episodes of failure

In July 2024, an alarming situation arose when a security solution provider failed to deliver a software update on time, leading to worldwide disruption. Long queues formed at airports in the US, Europe and Asia as airlines lost access to key check-in and booking services. The outage coincided with the peak travel season and resulted in millions of travellers being stranded or delayed during the summer holidays. This highlights an important realisation: preparing systems for such unplanned scenarios is not optional, but essential.

These are just a few examples of how outages — whether simple, complex or alarming— - emphasize the importance of resilience in every component of the airport IT infrastructure, which includes private clouds, on-premises and public cloud environments. Systems for biometric authentication, queue management, aircraft scheduling and baggage handling must function seamlessly to ensure smooth, efficient airport operations. Ensuring system resilience isn’t just about reliability, but also about proactively safeguarding against inevitable disruptions.

So why are airports still facing such costly disruptions, even with the best tools, technology and experts in the industry at their disposal?

Let’s dive into the answer.

In this season of giving, we share with you the 10 Ts to help you kick start your resilience journey.

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Team

Appoint a Resilience Champion with the right engineers who have a clear understanding of SLOs and SLIs specific to airport operations, such as passenger turnaround times and system uptime.

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Timing

Start early, scale fast to simulate all components of the airport software system, including check-in, security, and boarding processes.

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Tools

Don’t rely on manual activities, set up right observability and fault injection tools.

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Technology

Integrate chaos testing pipelines to simulate real world scenarios on cloud or on-premises, to ensure they can handle unexpected disruptions.

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Target

Choose shift- left, shift-right approach with right target environment targeting both early development stages and post-deployment environments to identify and fix issues promptly.

agile
Trouble

Identify all possible failure scenarios at infra, application and network components that could impact airport operations.

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Test

Create hypothesis, run all identified test scenarios and automate test cycle.

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Track

All KPIs to observe all required metrices like infra utilization, MTTR, MTTD and more.

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Tune

Learn from the observations and fine tune the system for improved resilience, ensuring that the airport software can handle peak loads and unexpected issues.

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Train

Educate team members and democratize resilience testing in the organization.

By following - Nagarro's 10 T’s for building resilient systems, Airports can reduce outages, improve performance, and, most importantly, keep the flyers satisfied and loyal.

Nagarro for resilience 

The Nagarro Resiliency Engineering Framework (NREF) helps you to continuously improve the resilience of your mission-critical applications and create a system that can adapt in the event of a failure. Our clients tell us that NREF has helped them to systematically achieve resiliency, systematically, with their critical software without impacting the business in the event of a failure of highly dependent systems. 


 
The key to avoiding unplanned outages and ensuring smooth operations during peak season is a proactive, holistic approach to building resilience. Rather than treating resilience as an afterthought, brands need to incorporate it into their development lifecycle through continuous testing and optimization.

As the big holiday season approaches, system resilience must be prioritized to keep passengers happy, especially during the busiest times. Rather than relying solely on scaling infrastructure, airports should take a more comprehensive approach by continuously building, testing and fine-tuning their systems.

To find out more about how resiliency engineering can help airports with resilient operations, speak to our experts.

Author

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Siddhartha Arora