The company is working with GE and other industry leaders to help airlines reduce the amount of delayed, damaged, and lost baggage – using Cloud Foundry and Predix.

Altoros, a developer of enterprise-grade software factories for organizations throughout the world, has announced participation as a supporting company in the Smart Airline Baggage Management Testbed. The initiative aims to increase the ability of airlines to track baggage, preventing theft and loss. The testbed includes GE, M2Mi, and Oracle as lead members.

How the Testbed Works

In the U.S., 6–7 bags are lost for every 1,000 handled—according to aviation IT company SITA and the U.S. Department of Transportation. The result is 23+ million mishandled bags annually. Travelers are inconvenienced, it costs airlines $100 to repatriate a delayed bag, and there is a risk exposure of as much as $3,300 per bag. The economic impact will only grow, as air traveler numbers are expected to double over the next 20 years.

The system developed by the testbed participants will track a bag from check-in to delivery—using RFID tags and a range of wireless devices. It smartly associates luggage with passengers and flights, tracking baggage location through GPS in real time and generating alerts / events, such as a bag located where it should not be or a weight change in a bag.

Complex Aviation Ecosystem

The testbed is part of a broader aviation ecosystem vision. It has been formed within the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), a nonprofit organization covering a variety of big issues in the areas of energy, water supply, etc.

The testbed is also aimed at helping airlines address the new requirements set out by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) in Resolution 753, which requires implementing more comprehensive solutions for baggage handling by June 2018.

What’s Under the Hood?

GE will be contributing its Predix® platform (based on Cloud Foundry) to host the platform side of the system. Oracle will provide apps built on its Oracle Airline Data Model (OADM), Oracle BI, and Oracle CX. M2Mi will provide the M2M and IoT device management, data handling, and instream analytics to connect edge devices to the platform apps. Altoros is contributing to developing RFID-based baggage tracking.

“Platforms like Predix and Cloud Foundry are making a revolutionary shift in how fast software is built, tested, deployed, and scaled,” said Elena Travkina, IoT Practice Lead at Altoros. “As a result, some critical problems in various industries can also be solved faster. We are very enthusiastic about helping this initiative grow—providing our Predix and microservices expertise.”

About Altoros

Altoros brings “software assembly lines” to organizations through training, deployment, and integration of solutions offered by the Cloud Foundry ecosystem. With 250+ employees across 8 countries, Altoros is the company behind some of the world’s largest Cloud Foundry deployments. For more, visit www.altoros.com