In the words of Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”, and in the modern age of international travel, this first step is often an airport.
With 16 million passengers passing through it in 2019, Budapest Airport is the biggest international airport in Hungary and a central hub for Southeastern Europe. However, the airport’s control and SCADA systems for operating critical infrastructure were ageing and not standardized. Here’s how COPA-DATA helped.
Airports have sophisticated systems in place to handle air traffic and passenger operations. Planes are guided step by step to their gates and starting positions by air-ground light systems (AGLS). Checked baggage and cargo is dealt with by separate automated baggage handling systems (BHS) to ensure that all baggage is registered, inspected, and transported to the correct place.
Budapest Liszt Ferenc Airport (BUD) is the international airport of Hungary’s capital, located just ten miles from central Budapest. In 2019 it was used by over 16 million passengers, but it is also an international freight airport and serves military purposes, meaning that it must be fully operational all year round.
System heterogeneity
Since its opening in 1950, BUD has undergone frequent extensions, modernisation and redesigns. These changes have been carried out at varying time points and by different contractors, meaning that while some existing systems and installations have remained unchanged, its overall system landscape is very heterogeneous. Because of this, the airport relies on several control systems for its AGLS and BHS.
“For operation and monitoring, we had a total of six Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems,” says Gรฉza Kulcsรกr, control systems group leader at Budapest Liszt Ferenc International Airport. “No less than four were in use for the BHS alone.”
As these systems had all been implemented by different systems integrators for specific installations, they all only had interfaces and visualisations for each of their individual purposes. This not only led to inconsistency between the look and feel of the human-machine interfaces (HMIs) making the operation less user-friendly but also increased the risk of misinterpretation.
The variability between these applications also meant that maintenance staff needed to be trained on each system, but also had to rely on several different integrators for support and modifications, some of which were no longer in existence or unable to assist with airport installations. “Comparably simple tasks such as operating system updates frequently turned out to be formidable challenges,” Gรฉza Kulcsรกr recalls. “Breakdowns of partial systems occurred regularly.”