Academic Session 2009-2010Seminar Report on Automated Baggage Handling System Prof. S. P. Untawale Project guide HOD Mechanical Department Submitted by:Murtaza Husain V sem B-127 I will always remain grateful to all my teachers for their excellent support in making this seminar.ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to express my gratitude towards the Principal. P. Nagpur. S. Untawale HOD of mechanical department who has been constant inspiration and for his support and guidance. for his permission for seminar. . YCCE. I want to thank Prof. it might only be a short walk to the passenger terminal. you might have bags making connecting flights that passengers miss. Conveyors equipped with junctions and sorting machines automatically route the bags to the gate. . This system incorporates some amazing technology to move bags from the check-in counter to the departure gate in an almost completely automated way: • • • • • • Destination-coded vehicles (DCVs). Automatic scanners scan the labels on the luggage. For instance. passengers might have to take a train. or bags failing to make connecting flights on time. A baggage-handling system has three main jobs: Move bags from the check-in area to the departure gate Move bags from one gate to another during transfers Move bags from the arrival gate to the baggage-claim area The measure of a successful baggage-handling system is simple: Can the bags move from point to point as fast as the travelers can? If the bags move slower. can load and unload bags without stopping.Introduction The baggage handling system at an airport plays a crucial role in keeping travelers happy. automated baggage-handling system designed by BAE Automated Systems. The Denver International Airport (1995) had the first modern. you'll have frustrated travelers waiting for bags. while in others. If the bags move too fast. It also can make the difference in an airport's ability to attract or keep a major airline hub. Inc. In some airports. Each airport has its own requirements. the time allotted for a bag to make it from the check-in area to the gate is determined by how fast a passenger can make the same trip. unmanned carts propelled by linear induction motors mounted to the tracks. the bonded debt of the municipally owned Denver Airport System was more than US $ 3. originally designed to distribute all baggage --including transfers -. Malfunctioning of such a vital system cost valuable time and money and most importantly causes negative publicity among the passengers. endorsed verbally by officials in Denver. the City and Country of Denver borrowed a previously unscheduled US $ 257 million. the New Denver International Airport.automatically between check-in. In the case of Denver. In many ways the New Denver Airport represents a model of the airport of the future. A year after the original opening date for the airport. Consequently. . This delay costs the owners a lot. Unfortunately. The above example explains the position and role of baggage handling system in an airport. the delays may thus have cost them around US $ 500 million.568 hectares (about 53 square miles). A mechanized baggage system is at the heart of the New Denver Airport. The repaired baggage handling system was unable to deliver the promised productivity and efficiency that they had bargained for. By March 1995. has been US $ 33 million a month. as for all major new airports. At opening. this was to be something unique: the "Integrated Automated Baggage Handling System". massive problems plagued this automated baggage system. A miscalculation on the part of the designer costs Denver a huge inexcusable. the aircraft and pick-up on arrival. uncalculated sum. The delay was around 16 months. It extends over 13. At the end of 1994.Role in an Airport The City and County of Denver had built a massive new airport.8 billion. The costs of maintaining the new airport are extra. A commonly accepted estimate of their costs of delay. the New Denver Airport did not open in October 1993 as scheduled. the Airport would have cost about US $ 5 billion including the US $ 685 million contribution of the Federal Government and the over US $ 400 million investment of airlines. The interest on their bonded debt exceeded US $ 271 million for the single year of 1994. Working . The tag has all of your flight information on it. The conveyor system has to sort all of the bags from all of the different airlines and send them to DCVs that are headed to the proper terminal. including underneath. The last step in the main-terminal conveyor system is a conveyor that loads your bag into a passing DCV. . Once the baggage-handling system has read the 10-digit bar-code number. This device is able to scan the bar codes on about 90 percent of the bags that pass by. bag can be sent to nearly any destination automatically. This step is the equivalent of a highway on-ramp. including your destination and any stopover cities. At any time. Conveyors The conveyors in the main terminal of the Denver airport comprise a huge network.Check-in When you check in. a machine called a pusher either lets it pass or pushes it onto another conveyor. The DCVs unloads they move past the unload conveyer. it knows where your bag is at all times. When your bag comes to a junction. This station is actually an array of bar-code scanners arranged 360 degrees around the conveyor. This number is unique to your luggage. The rest of the bags are routed to another conveyor to be manually scanned. Through this network of conveyors and junctions. All of the computers in the baggage-handling system can use this number to look up your itinerary. Once your bag has been scanned. it knows exactly where your bag is on the conveyor system. as well as a bar code that contains a ten-digit number. For example. There are hundreds of different conveyors with junctions connecting all of them. Your bag's first stop (after check-in) is at an automated bar-code scanner. By this point bag is very close to the plane. the agent pulls up your itinerary on the computer and prints out one or more tags to attach to each of your pieces of luggage. it routes bags headed out of the country through X-ray machines and other security devices. the baggage-handling system tracks its movement. Conveyors take each bag to the appropriate destination. DCVs The job of the destination-coded vehicle (DCV) is to move bag quickly to an off-ramp at the gate. bags that will be making a transfer after the flight are loaded into separate areas than bags that will be heading to baggage claim. The DCV rides on a metal track. Making Transfers In a hub. At the sorting station. This is similar to the circuit inside anti-shoplifting devices. so for the bags to keep up they need to be able to move between gates very quickly. the people can get off the plane faster than the bags can be unloaded. A monitor at the sorting station tells the handlers which bags are going where. When loading the plane.one on the track and one on the bottom of the DCV -. the goal of the system is to have the bags keep up with the passengers. Loading the Plane There is an off-ramp at every gate in the terminal. It uses electromagnets to build two magnetic fields -. The main advantages of this system are its speed. they are brought the short distance to the plane and loaded. . It is propelled by linear induction motors mounted to the track. After the bags are loaded into carts or containers.that are attracted to each other. a linear induction motor has no moving parts. most of the people coming through it are making transfers. Some planes are bulk loaded. meaning that special containers are loaded on the ground and then placed into the plane. Its only electronic device is a passive radio-frequency circuit that broadcasts a unique number identifying that particular car. The motor moves the magnetic field on the track. Other planes are container loaded. like a roller coaster. efficiency. durability. baggage handlers load the bags onto carts or into special containers that go right into the airplane. Generally. The DCV can travel up to five times faster than a conveyor -. meaning the bags are brought up one-by-one on a conveyor and placed into shelves in the cargo hold. pulling the DCV along behind it at a high rate of speed.almost 20 mph (32 kph). The DCV is a metal cart with wheels on the bottom and a plastic tub on top. precision and manageability. The bags make their way down a short conveyor to a sorting station on the ground at the gate. Again. and passengers make the commute fairly quickly by train. Unlike most electric motors. DCVs are used at the Denver airport because the distance from the main terminal to the passenger terminals is quite long. . where they move through scanning stations and then are routed onto the DCV track. it is easy to keep the transferring bags separate from the terminating bags.6 mi long (1 km) long. The DCV takes the bags to the proper gate and unloads them. The terminal has two separate DCV tracks that make loops around the terminal in opposite directions. Baggage Claim Bags coming off a plane that are staying in Denver are loaded into carts and pulled by tug to the baggage-claim area. they are loaded onto a short conveyor that deposits them onto the carousel. When the bags get to the baggage-claim area. and some bags may have to travel that whole distance.The terminals are about . The transferring bags are loaded onto conveyors. Since the bags are already sorted when they come off the plane. The point of this is to avoid situations where some lines get little or no . The fully automated system may never be able to deliver bags consistently within the times and at the capacity originally promised. empty carts will only arrive after they have deposited their previous loads and have proceeded through the system. As the name suggests. Deeper Problem of Reliable Delivery There is a deeper. In short it is a complicated "cascade of queues". the type of aircraft at each gate. The entire system consists of well over a hundred waiting lines that feed into each other. it is crucial to control the capacity of the system so that all lines of flow have balanced service. Managing these flows under all the realistic scenarios is exponentially more difficult. Conceptually. once one thinks about it. These depend on the season. fully loaded queues efficiently for any single scenario is complicated. This difficulty is a consequence of the extreme complexity of its design combined with the variability of the loads. To guarantee acceptable delivery times under all circumstances in a network of queues such as at Denver. bags can only be unloaded from the aircraft and put into the system when the unloading conveyor belt is moving. the problem of "line balancing" is simple. the issue is to provide equally good service to all lines. this belt will only advance when there are empty carts on which to place bags. For example. and so on. This is the "line balancing" problem. Difficulties in "Line Balancing" The complexity of a fully automated system leads to tremendous difficulties in trying to achieve reliable delivery times. cargo or materials.Problems of Automation Initial problem faced by the baggage handling system of the Denver airport were that baggage carts have jammed in the tracks. misaligned with the conveyor belts feeding the bags. fundamental problem associated with all complex systems of handling baggage. There may be over a thousand reasonable scenarios! Managing a complex network of interacting. the time of day. The patterns of loads on the system are highly variable. and mutilated and lost bags. in the case of Denver to provide sufficient empty carts to each of the conveyor belts that feed bags onto the system of carts. the number of passengers on these aircraft etc. The more extensive and long-term difficulty is that of "reliable delivery times". at the right time. The solution to the line-balancing problem is to control the "empties". The difficulty in solving the line balancing problem increases exponentially with the number of lines or queues requiring service. Specifically for the fully automated baggage system originally planned for Denver. The problems of line-balancing are common and should be well-known to all systems designers. to all users of the system. to make sure that there is enough space available. This is especially true for complicated systems such as Denver. with highly variable flows on close to 100 independent lines of access. to avoid the possibility that some connections simply do not function. the crux of the solution is to devise control systems that will deliver enough empty carts to all the conveyor belts delivering bags to the system. Solving the line balancing problem efficiently can be very difficult. Most people have experienced the difficulties that arise when line-balancing has not been achieved. This is where the complexity of the fully automated baggage system originally designed for Denver has a major impact. . This kind of failure can easily happen in any system where a common artery serves many demands. Think of the times you could not get on a bus because it was crowded by people who had boarded at earlier stops.service. BA and Vanderlande Industries of the Netherlands. The system was designed by an integrated team from BAA. and will handle both intraterminal and inter-terminal luggage and will actually process 70. sorting and automatic sorting and passenger reconciliation. It will have underground tunnel connecting terminals. Bags undergo several processes on the way through the system including automatic identification. explosives screening. There will be two systems including a main baggage sorter and a fast track system.000 bags a day. fast tracking for urgent bags. and an underground baggage storage area which will store trolleys containing transfer baggage.Latest Development The baggage handling system at Heathrow T5 is part of BAA's £900million baggage improvement plans to make it the largest baggage handling system in Europe for a single terminal. . . Vanderlande Industries. Briefing Report to the Hon."Transport Journal. GAO/RCED-95-35BR. USA. Smart design of baggage handling systems.Bibliography Geerdes. MA. (1978). Part 2 Baggage handling. (2005). R. 11. Daskin. UK Institution of Civil Engineers. (2007). US Senate. Master Thesis. 2. 4. System Book. US Government Accounting Office (1994) New Denver Airport: Impact of the Delayed Baggage System. Vol. 5. (1995) "Designing Airport Passenger Buildings for the 21st." Doctoral Dissertation. 1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Effects of Origin-Destination Matrix on the Performance of Loop Transportation Systems. and Liu. Leone. Journal of Air Transport Management. W. 69–78. Hank Brown. Century. pp. K. M. Oct. the Netherlands. The Netherlands... Cambridge. 3. de Neufville.. 6. University of Twente. R. The key design parameters of checked baggage security screening systems in airports. Veghel. 2001.