The information displayed on third-party applications can differ from the data displayed upon the flight information display screens (FIDS) located within airport terminals, causing confusion.
Manchester Airports Group (MAG), the United Kingdom’s largest group of airports that owns and operates Manchester, London Stansted, and East Midlands airports, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) collaborated with Ryanair, to develop a near-real-time event platform to improve the passenger experience for the hundreds of Ryanair flights that go through London Stansted and Manchester daily.
Working with existing tools
MAG uses technology that is hosted in house to manage its airports, including stand and gate allocations. Members of the operations team and ground handling agents at MAG airports interact with this platform using various applications. When there is a gate change, employees enter the new information into the database, which then updates the FIDS.
Exposing in-house data
MAG feeds operational data from its in-house airport operational database (AODB) in-line with the events happening during daily operations. Using the AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), a managed migration and replication service that helps move database and analytics workloads to AWS quickly and securely, MAG facilitates change data capture (CDC) to publish all events into its private cluster in Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK). This includes gate events in near real-time.
After a change is made to gate information at the table level and published to Kafka, an in-house developed microservice running in Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) detects the event. The microservice performs a transformation from the CDC data and maps it to an agreed upon schema, and the data is published as a standardized JSON object. This is published to a public, fully managed Amazon MSK service instance, within a topic that is provided on a per-airline basis that is secured using certificates and IP ranges.
Consuming gate changes
Airlines can create infrastructure to ingest gate change events by subscribing to the Kafka topics exposed by MAG. After airlines ingest the events, they can publish the data to customers using channels, such as push notifications, in their native mobile applications.
This facilitates consistency between what travelers see in airports and what they see in their airline web or mobile application.
This functionality is available for Ryanair customers using London Stansted and Manchester airports, with plans to expand to other airports in the future.
John Hudson, chief technology officer at MAG, said, “By working alongside both AWS and Ryanair, we connect and combine our unique insights, resulting in a more holistic view of our customers, helping us to offer personalized and seamless experiences while continuously improving our products and services.”
John Hurley, chief technology officer of Ryanair, said, “We are excited to work alongside AWS and MAG to make our customer experience in their airports as seamless as possible by providing live gate information as soon as it becomes available to us. This aligns with our Day of Travel initiative aimed at making the passenger journey as straightforward as possible.”
To learn more, visit aws.com/travel.
Ian Frawley
Head of Engineering
Manchester Airports Group
Ronan Prenty
Solutions Architect
AWS
