Good ideas, it is often said,don’t just fall out of the sky. But sometimes they’re hiding in plain sight.
During the pandemic, Brian Cobb, chief innovation officer at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG), was introduced to Michael Bettua, an enterprise software entrepreneur with a new startup called Volan Technology. The company was pitching a system that used low-energy Bluetooth badges for contact tracing in schools and other organizations. Cobb was interested in Volan’s network-based technology, but not its particular application. Specifically, he wondered if the technology might have other uses more germane to CVG’s operational needs. So he and Bettua began exploring alternate uses of the system developed for school settings.
“That’s really the premise of our innovation programming,” Cobb explains. “The solution will not always be in our industry.”
 facts&figures
Project: Monitoring System Trial Location: Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Int’l Airport, in KY Test Area: Construction site for 500,000 sq. ft. airline hangar System Provider: Volan Technology Format: Solar-powered, wireless mesh network tracks location of low-energy Bluetooth badges worn by construction workers & other project personnel Network Installation: Less than 4 hours Pilot Duration: 9 months Scale: 25 badges deployed Key Benefits: Fewer safety escorts needed; ability to monitor location of workers; haptic alerts when personnel enter restricted areas; stored data for after-incident analysis & reporting |
Eventually, they landed on the idea of using the Volan Positioning System (VPS), which provides “eye in the sky” monitoring of people—or things—in a given location, whether outside, inside or underground. Together, they identified two promising applications. One was to use VPS for tracking the movement of airport assets, like lawn mowers, snowplows or tugs. “If you have a tag on an asset,” says Cobb, “you not only know where that lawn mower is, you can also quickly figure out how long it took to mow an area. You can really start figuring out your labor implications.”
The second potential use was to help ensure construction workers and other project personnel are not interfering with operations or entering restricted areas. “Airports are really challenged with maintaining cost control and improving operational efficiency, but also improving safety at the same time,” notes Bettua.
He was convinced VPS could help on all three fronts.
Then and Now
Traditionally, airports and construction companies rely on two methods to expand their “span of control” and prevent construction workers from straying into areas that could be dangerous for both them and airfield operations: physical fencing and safety escorts. With a typical ratio of one safety escort for every five workers—or one-to-one for the most sensitive airside projects—costs can quickly escalate. For a yearlong project with 100 workers, Volan estimates that safety escorts can add nearly $1 million in secondary costs.
Cobb, whose airport handles about 9 million annual passengers and significant cargo volume, points out that monitoring project worksites that have temporary fence barricades relies on “see something, say something” principles. “So that’s where we started to hypothesize: Is there technology that can actually help improve security, safety and cost implications?”
A nine-month trial that concluded earlier this year helped answer that question.
The execution of the pilot program was relatively straightforward. Volan installed its VPS, a solar-powered, wireless mesh network that is independent of the airport’s own IT systems, at the construction site for a 500,000-square-foot airline hangar. The installation took two employees less than four hours to complete. Construction workers and other project personnel were issued Bluetooth-connected badges on lanyards that send data about their location to the network. The badges not only helped safety escorts keep track of workers—via a dashboard on portable electronic tablets—but also notified workers if they approached a no-go zone. Because airport worksites are often noisy, the system uses haptics rather than audio alerts. “If workers don’t heed the warning,” Cobb says, “it starts to escalate up to the appropriate authorities, be it the Police Department or the Airport Operations Center.”
Bettua notes that VPS not only reduces the number of safety escorts needed, it also improves the efficiency of those who remain. For instance, instead of safety escorts physically navigating through the airfield to secure the SIDA (security identification display area) badge numbers of wayward workers, the system can automatically detect them and instantly send their SIDA badge information to Airport Operations. This allows airport personnel to pull up a live map, possibly with closed-circuit video footage, and triangulate to intervene before a safety incident occurs.
Apart from virtually real-time personnel monitoring and live alerts about breaches, the system also provides valuable after-incident data. If, for instance, a raised runway light is knocked over, information stored in the cloud can be “played back” for analysis and filing reports. Aggregated data, Cobb notes, can be used to detect larger patterns. “You see where that badge has traveled. What are the consistent travel paths? What are the areas that we should be focusing on over others?”
The badges themselves, he adds, could also serve as an auxiliary warning method during severe weather. “How many transient workers come into an airport space and don’t have the luxury of carrying an airport radio?” he asks rhetorically.
To address privacy concerns, data collected by the system is anonymized and encrypted at “NSA levels” says Bettua.
Costs and Challenges
For Cobb, using technology is a smart spend, and he encourages other airports to consider where they are spending funds. As an example, he contrasts purchasing a single-use jobsite fence with investing in a data analytics strategy that can have significant, lasting forensics value regarding security, safety and other project implications.
As with any trial, there were details to work through. Initially, he considered using a watch-based monitoring and analytics system already used by the airport’s housekeeping and environmental services departments. But this wasn’t ideal, for several reasons. The first was durability. “You have to remember, they’re construction workers,” Cobb advises. “They’re moving concrete; they’re moving stone. It’s not the best environment for a watch.” The second was functionality. The watches relied on GPS signaling. But getting accurate location information requires frequent pings, which means high battery usage. “At best, we would get three to four hours of working time,” Cobb recalls.
Enter Volan, with a badge that relied on low-energy Bluetooth for connectivity and, because it was a badge, was similar to the IDs that airport workers were already accustomed to wearing. Working together, CVG and Volan tweaked VPS to fit the airport’s needs. The first iteration of the mesh network used solar-powered sensors to help create the geofence. But the Cincinnati area doesn’t have reliably sunny weather, so the project team changed to the so-called LoRaWan protocol, a low-power, wide-area networking technology. From a single beacon placed on top of an airport building, the system could send the needed signal from a mile away and cover a fair amount of CVG’s 7,700-acre campus. “It’s a much wider area we’re able to geofence, with much less equipment,” Cobb comments.
With the nine-month trial concluded, the next step will be to operationalize the technology and seek TSA’s support. And, even if the technology seems to work, the larger issue is ensuring it works for the airport. “Is it innovation, or is it change management?” Cobb asks. “Innovation may have found the product, but we’re trying to improve our business over how we did it yesterday. Can we provide a better product and do it safer, faster, more efficiently?”
The concept or technology, he adds, is only as good as the practice. “It’s a tremendous amount of data. If we’re not going to use the data, then why are we encumbering a staff member to use this?”
As some questions get answered, others pop up. Overall, however, Bettua is optimistic about the ultimate adoption of VPS—especially given the amount of construction being funded by the FAA Airport Improvement Program. “Think of us as the secret sauce that is making airports more secure, safer, and saving them a ton of money,” says Bettua.
