Academic Session 2009-2010

Seminar Report on
Automated Baggage Handling System

Prof. S. P. Untawale
Project guide
HOD Mechanical Department

Submitted by:-
Murtaza Husain
V sem B-127
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to express my gratitude towards the Principal, YCCE,

Nagpur, for his permission for seminar. I want to thank Prof. S. P.
Untawale HOD of mechanical department who has been constant
inspiration and for his support and guidance. I will always remain
grateful to all my teachers for their excellent support in making this
seminar.
 Introduction
The baggage handling system at an airport plays a crucial role in keeping
travelers happy. It also can make the difference in an airport's ability to
attract or keep a major airline hub.

A baggage-handling system has three main jobs:

• Move bags from the check-in area to the departure gate
• Move bags from one gate to another during transfers
• Move bags from the arrival gate to the baggage-claim area

The measure of a successful baggage-handling system is simple: Can the

bags move from point to point as fast as the travelers can? If the bags
move slower, you'll have frustrated travelers waiting for bags, or bags
failing to make connecting flights on time. If the bags move too fast, you
might have bags making connecting flights that passengers miss.

Each airport has its own requirements. For instance, the time allotted for
a bag to make it from the check-in area to the gate is determined by how
fast a passenger can make the same trip. In some airports, it might only
be a short walk to the passenger terminal, while in others; passengers
might have to take a train.

The Denver International Airport (1995) had the first modern, automated
baggage-handling system designed by BAE Automated Systems, Inc.
This system incorporates some amazing technology to move bags from
the check-in counter to the departure gate in an almost completely
automated way:
• Destination-coded vehicles (DCVs), unmanned carts propelled
by linear induction motors mounted to the tracks, can load and
unload bags without stopping.
• Automatic scanners scan the labels on the luggage.
• Conveyors equipped with junctions and sorting machines
automatically route the bags to the gate.
 Role in an Airport
The City and County of Denver had built a massive new airport, the New
Denver International Airport. It extends over 13,568 hectares (about 53
square miles). In many ways the New Denver Airport represents a model
of the airport of the future.

At opening, the Airport would have cost about US $ 5 billion including

the US $ 685 million contribution of the Federal Government and the
over US $ 400 million investment of airlines. At the end of 1994, the
bonded debt of the municipally owned Denver Airport System was more
than US $ 3.8 billion.

A mechanized baggage system is at the heart of the New Denver Airport,

as for all major new airports. In the case of Denver, this was to be
something unique: the "Integrated Automated Baggage Handling
System", originally designed to distribute all baggage --including
transfers -- automatically between check-in, the aircraft and pick-up on
arrival.

Unfortunately, massive problems plagued this automated baggage system.

Consequently, the New Denver Airport did not open in October 1993 as
scheduled. The delay was around 16 months. This delay costs the owners
a lot. The interest on their bonded debt exceeded US $ 271 million for the
single year of 1994. The costs of maintaining the new airport are extra. A
commonly accepted estimate of their costs of delay, endorsed verbally by
officials in Denver, has been US $ 33 million a month. By March 1995,
the delays may thus have cost them around US $ 500 million. A year after
the original opening date for the airport, the City and Country of Denver
borrowed a previously unscheduled US $ 257 million.

The above example explains the position and role of baggage handling
system in an airport. A miscalculation on the part of the designer costs
Denver a huge inexcusable, uncalculated sum. The repaired baggage
handling system was unable to deliver the promised productivity and
efficiency that they had bargained for. Malfunctioning of such a vital
system cost valuable time and money and most importantly causes
negative publicity among the passengers.
Working
Check-in
When you check in, the agent pulls up your itinerary on the computer and
prints out one or more tags to attach to each of your pieces of luggage.
The tag has all of your flight information on it, including your destination
and any stopover cities, as well as a bar code that contains a ten-digit
number. This number is unique to your luggage. All of the computers in
the baggage-handling system can use this number to look up your
itinerary.
Your bag's first stop (after check-in) is at an automated bar-code scanner.
This station is actually an array of bar-code scanners arranged 360
degrees around the conveyor, including underneath. This device is able to
scan the bar codes on about 90 percent of the bags that pass by. The rest
of the bags are routed to another conveyor to be manually scanned.
Once the baggage-handling system has read the 10-digit bar-code
number, it knows where your bag is at all times. Conveyors take each bag
to the appropriate destination. For example, it routes bags headed out of
the country through X-ray machines and other security devices.
Conveyors
The conveyors in the main terminal of the Denver airport comprise a
huge network. There are hundreds of different conveyors with junctions
connecting all of them. The conveyor system has to sort all of the bags
from all of the different airlines and send them to DCVs that are headed
to the proper terminal.
Once your bag has been scanned, the baggage-handling system tracks its
movement. At any time, it knows exactly where your bag is on the
conveyor system. When your bag comes to a junction, a machine called a
pusher either lets it pass or pushes it onto another conveyor. Through this
network of conveyors and junctions, bag can be sent to nearly any
destination automatically.
The last step in the main-terminal conveyor system is a conveyor that
loads your bag into a passing DCV. This step is the equivalent of a
highway on-ramp. The DCVs unloads they move past the unload
conveyer. By this point bag is very close to the plane.
DCVs
The job of the destination-coded vehicle (DCV) is to move bag quickly to
an off-ramp at the gate. DCVs are used at the Denver airport because the
distance from the main terminal to the passenger terminals is quite long,
and passengers make the commute fairly quickly by train. The DCV can
travel up to five times faster than a conveyor -- almost 20 mph (32 kph).

The DCV is a metal cart with wheels on the bottom and a plastic tub on
top. Its only electronic device is a passive radio-frequency circuit that
broadcasts a unique number identifying that particular car. This is similar
to the circuit inside anti-shoplifting devices.

The DCV rides on a metal track, like a roller coaster. It is propelled by

linear induction motors mounted to the track. Unlike most electric
motors, a linear induction motor has no moving parts. It uses
electromagnets to build two magnetic fields -- one on the track and one
on the bottom of the DCV -- that are attracted to each other. The motor
moves the magnetic field on the track, pulling the DCV along behind it at
a high rate of speed. The main advantages of this system are its speed,
efficiency, durability, precision and manageability.
Loading the Plane
There is an off-ramp at every gate in the terminal. The bags make their
way down a short conveyor to a sorting station on the ground at the gate.
At the sorting station, baggage handlers load the bags onto carts or into
special containers that go right into the airplane. When loading the plane,
bags that will be making a transfer after the flight are loaded into separate
areas than bags that will be heading to baggage claim. A monitor at the
sorting station tells the handlers which bags are going where.
After the bags are loaded into carts or containers, they are brought the
short distance to the plane and loaded. Some planes are bulk loaded,
meaning the bags are brought up one-by-one on a conveyor and placed
into shelves in the cargo hold. Other planes are container loaded, meaning
that special containers are loaded on the ground and then placed into the
plane.
Making Transfers
In a hub, most of the people coming through it are making transfers.
Again, the goal of the system is to have the bags keep up with the
passengers. Generally, the people can get off the plane faster than the
bags can be unloaded, so for the bags to keep up they need to be able to
move between gates very quickly.
The terminals are about .6 mi long (1 km) long, and some bags may have
to travel that whole distance. The terminal has two separate DCV tracks
that make loops around the terminal in opposite directions.
The transferring bags are loaded onto conveyors, where they move
through scanning stations and then are routed onto the DCV track. The
DCV takes the bags to the proper gate and unloads them.
Baggage Claim
Bags coming off a plane that are staying in Denver are loaded into carts
and pulled by tug to the baggage-claim area. Since the bags are already
sorted when they come off the plane, it is easy to keep the transferring
bags separate from the terminating bags. When the bags get to the
baggage-claim area, they are loaded onto a short conveyor that deposits
them onto the carousel.
 Problems of Automation
Initial problem faced by the baggage handling system of the Denver
airport were that baggage carts have jammed in the tracks, misaligned
with the conveyor belts feeding the bags, and mutilated and lost bags.
Deeper Problem of Reliable Delivery
There is a deeper, fundamental problem associated with all complex
systems of handling baggage, cargo or materials. The more extensive and
long-term difficulty is that of "reliable delivery times". The fully
automated system may never be able to deliver bags consistently within
the times and at the capacity originally promised. This difficulty is a
consequence of the extreme complexity of its design combined with the
variability of the loads.

The entire system consists of well over a hundred waiting lines that feed
into each other. For example, bags can only be unloaded from the aircraft
and put into the system when the unloading conveyor belt is moving, this
belt will only advance when there are empty carts on which to place bags,
empty carts will only arrive after they have deposited their previous loads
and have proceeded through the system, and so on. In short it is a
complicated "cascade of queues".

The patterns of loads on the system are highly variable. These depend on
the season, the time of day, the type of aircraft at each gate, the number of
passengers on these aircraft etc. There may be over a thousand reasonable
scenarios! Managing a complex network of interacting, fully loaded
queues efficiently for any single scenario is complicated. Managing these
flows under all the realistic scenarios is exponentially more difficult.

Difficulties in "Line Balancing"

The complexity of a fully automated system leads to tremendous
difficulties in trying to achieve reliable delivery times. To guarantee
acceptable delivery times under all circumstances in a network of queues
such as at Denver, it is crucial to control the capacity of the system so that
all lines of flow have balanced service. This is the "line balancing"
problem. Conceptually, the problem of "line balancing" is simple, once
one thinks about it. As the name suggests, the issue is to provide equally
good service to all lines, in the case of Denver to provide sufficient empty
carts to each of the conveyor belts that feed bags onto the system of carts.
The point of this is to avoid situations where some lines get little or no
service, to avoid the possibility that some connections simply do not
function.

This kind of failure can easily happen in any system where a common
artery serves many demands. Most people have experienced the
difficulties that arise when line-balancing has not been achieved. Think of
the times you could not get on a bus because it was crowded by people
who had boarded at earlier stops. The problems of line-balancing are
common and should be well-known to all systems designers.

The solution to the line-balancing problem is to control the "empties", to

make sure that there is enough space available, at the right time, to all
users of the system. Specifically for the fully automated baggage system
originally planned for Denver, the crux of the solution is to devise control
systems that will deliver enough empty carts to all the conveyor belts
delivering bags to the system.

Solving the line balancing problem efficiently can be very difficult. This
is especially true for complicated systems such as Denver, with highly
variable flows on close to 100 independent lines of access. This is where
the complexity of the fully automated baggage system originally designed
for Denver has a major impact. The difficulty in solving the line
balancing problem increases exponentially with the number of lines or
queues requiring service.
 Latest Development

The baggage handling system at Heathrow T5 is part of BAA's

£900million baggage improvement plans to make it the largest baggage
handling system in Europe for a single terminal. There will be two
systems including a main baggage sorter and a fast track system. It will
have underground tunnel connecting terminals, and an underground
baggage storage area which will store trolleys containing transfer
baggage.

The system was designed by an integrated team from BAA, BA and

Vanderlande Industries of the Netherlands, and will handle both intra-
terminal and inter-terminal luggage and will actually process 70,000 bags
a day.

Bags undergo several processes on the way through the system including
automatic identification, explosives screening, fast tracking for urgent
bags, sorting and automatic sorting and passenger reconciliation.
 Bibliography

1. Geerdes, W., Smart design of baggage handling systems, Master

Thesis, (2007), University of Twente, The Netherlands.

2. Leone, K., and Liu, R., The key design parameters of checked
baggage security screening systems in airports, Journal of Air
Transport Management, Vol. 11, (2005), pp. 69–78.

3. System Book, Part 2 Baggage handling, 2001, Vanderlande

Industries, Veghel, the Netherlands.

4. Daskin, M. (1978), "Effects of Origin-Destination Matrix on the

Performance of Loop Transportation Systems," Doctoral
Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge,
MA, USA.

5. de Neufville, R. (1995) "Designing Airport Passenger Buildings for

the 21st. Century,"Transport Journal, UK Institution of Civil
Engineers.

6. US Government Accounting Office (1994) New Denver Airport:

Impact of the Delayed Baggage System, Briefing Report to the
Hon. Hank Brown, US Senate, GAO/RCED-95-35BR, Oct.