MARCH 2020 • LONGISLANDPRESS.COM 27
WHOLLY MOLI
LAGUARDIA AIRPORT
BOHEMIA’S DIGITAL TWIN
BY CLAUDE SOLNIK
While backhoes, trucks and construction
workers rebuild a new
LaGuardia Airport, a company’s
Long Island office has quietly constructed
a digital double or “twin”
of an entire terminal to provide, visualize,
and manage data, achieving
efficiencies and savings.
SITA, the global airline and airport
information technology company,
has built a digital twin or interactive
image of a terminal that can provide
information in real time for LaGuardia
Airport Terminal B to better visualize
and manage the terminal.
“The digital twin was born in Bohemia,”
says Anthony Natale, SITA’s vice president,
Northeast United States, Canada,
and Bermuda. “It came up in a conversation
with a customer and evolved to
a new indispensable tool for airport
operations teams.”
A touch screen displaying the terminal
can be manipulated to provide images
as well as in-depth information regarding
wait times, queues, airline arrivals,
weather, cleaning, and much more. A
form of the technology is also used in
another transportation industry, where
data has long been streamed instantaneously,
due to the demands for speed.
“The digital twin is a concept that
emerged from Formula One racing,”
says Kevin O’Sullivan, lead engineer for
SITA’s digital twin. “They get detailed
telemetry about their car. They can have
a virtual or digital replica of that car and
simulate models on their computers.”
Expanding that concept to an airport
with so many activities, wasn’t an easy
task. But at LaGuardia, the digital twin
SITA Lab Director Gustavo Pina demonstrates the
digital twin of LaGuardia Airport.
is up and running for one terminal,
fi lled with and providing data.
“We’re taking that digital twin concept,
having detailed telemetry and live
streaming data, and applying that to
a whole airport campus,” O’Sullivan
says. “We take a total airport management
view, fl ight events, security wait
time, passenger feedback,
passenger capacity in terminal
arrival buildings. We
visualize that in a 3-D map of
LaGuardia Airport.”
He calls the digital twin a
dashboard in the “operations
control room of LaGuardia,
like a NASA command
room,” with everything able
to run on an 86-inch touch
screen, giving a centralized
view of what happens at the
airport.
“We’re just scratching the surface of the
capabilities of a twin, as we continuously
monitor and build the historical data
of the operations,” Natale says. “With
machine learning and predictive capacity,
we’ll be able to better forecast what
a day of operations would look like to
better adjust.”
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