3 data sources to optimize airport baggage infrastructure

1. The baggage tag

When it comes to understanding baggage arrivals, one of the most important sources of data available to us is the baggage tag.

The baggage tag holds valuable information on baggage scan times. This includes:

• Baggage Source Message (BSM): The Baggage Source Message contains real-time information on the bag itinerary (time and date, flight(s), destination(s)), and whether the bag is local or connecting.
• Baggage Processed Message (BPM): The Baggage Processed Message is an update tagged onto the BSM. It’s local to the airport and is updated with real-time information on the bag as it travels through the baggage system, including potential time stamps for check-in, screening, sortation, early baggage storage, and more.

The BSM data covers the full journey of the bag as it travels from origin to the final destination, allowing your airport to analyze onwards segments yourself. This enables you to challenge airlines and handling agents on their need for segregations.

2. Baggage arrival curves

When we aggregate the information of the BSM and BPM, the result allows us to see what the baggage arrival curves look like — the next valuable source of data on the agenda.

Baggage arrival curves show how bags arrive for the flight. They’re important because they should drive the demand for baggage make-up positions (MUPs) and inbound reclaim belt allocations.

Airports often allocate resources evenly throughout a given time frame. But what if you could allocate resources dynamically based on demand instead?

Allocating by demand helps ensure that your resources are utilized optimally and are not wasted during times when they are less needed. An airport’s ability to allocate by demand, however, often comes down to the infrastructure of the airport.

For example, if you have laterals, allocating by demand can be challenging, as it can be difficult to allocate multiple airlines to the same lateral. If you have chutes, it is easier to allocate fewer MUPs per flight — but the need for multiple segregations can be a challenge. If you have race tracks, you have almost full flexibility in terms of MUP allocation — but racetracks require manual sortation, which can lead to sortation errors.

3. Outbound and inbound infrastructure

As mentioned, your airport’s infrastructure plays an important role in your ability to allocate resources by demand — particularly your baggage infrastructure.

When optimizing your baggage infrastructure, it’s crucial to take both your outbound and inbound infrastructure into consideration.

Key elements to consider for outbound infrastructure include:

• Chutes: With chutes, it’s easy to make segregations. However, it’s difficult to store bags in chute MUPs, and full unit load devices (ULDs) will need to be placed elsewhere.
• Laterals: Laterals provide the option of a little more storage. However, laterals can only accommodate 1-2 flights from the same airline with the same handling agent.
• Race tracks: Race tracks offer flexibility and can accommodate many flights. However, they also place the responsibility of sorting bags correctly onto the handling agent.

As for inbound infrastructure, key elements to consider include:

• Race tracks: The length of the race track belt is key. If the belt is 60 meters long, but 20 meters are against a wall, only 40 meters are available for passengers to use. It’s important to consider how many meters passengers are actually able to line up against.
• Offload infrastructure: An element which is sometimes overlooked is that the race track belt needs to be fed from the secure airside area, making it key to understand the offload infrastructure surrounding the race track. The length of one offload belt may differ from another, meaning you may have a longer belt for a shorter carousel. If an offload belt can only fit three sorting positions, it may not be a good match for the longer race track belt.