Back to Air Transport IT Review - Issue 2, September 2009
Mobility focus group formed as industry demand grows
SITA is creating a Mobile Workforce Innovation Focus Group to define industry requirements for a common-use context aware platform at airports. The aim is to boost the efficiency of airside operations and reduce flight delays, through the improved provision of mobile solutions to airline and airport staff.
The announcement comes as the Airline IT Trends Surveys shows that 78% of airlines intend to adapt their web sites to work on mobile phones by 2012, and as mobility becomes an area of increasing focus for the industry.
In support of industry demand for mobile phone applications, SITA chose the Air Transport IT Summit to demonstrate a mobile web application being trialled with Malaysia Airlines. It will enable mobile phone check-in and other functionality to web-enabled smart phones.
Jim Peters, SITA Chief Technology Officer, said: "This research and development, combined with the arrival of 100% Bar Coded Boarding Passes next year, could create the necessary impetus to make mobile phones an essential travel tool for flight booking, check-in and boarding."
Real-time needs
Announcing the creation of the focus group, SITA's Vice President for Innovation, Technology and Research, Greg Ouillon, said: "The biggest drawback of existing mobile solutions today is the difficulty of adapting them to meet the real-time needs of workers in the airport environment and the cost of deployment.
"The key to success is contextual information, adapting information delivery dynamically, to completely transform airport business processes especially for key on-the-ground staff such as turnaround dispatch teams and maintenance engineers."
SITA's approach is to deploy a common-use context-aware platform at airports to support multiple mobile application scenarios, including passenger management, baggage processing, aircraft turn-around and airport operations.
Working with Appear, the leader in context-aware software infrastructure, SITA has deployed a live pilot of a mobile workforce solution for line maintenance with the Portuguese airline TAP. Other pilots are also underway.
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