Airport Technology Lab

After successfully submitting a project proposal at “Kansen voor West II” , three faculties from TU Delft (AE-, EEMCS-, and the IDE-faculty) and more than 10 partners (Rotterdam The Hague Innovation Airport, RTHA, the Municipality of Rotterdam, multiple businesses and knowledge institutes) will work on creating an “Airport Technology Lab” (ATL) at Rotterdam The Hague Airport. This field lab will focus on development of data-related innovations in the airport domain.
The multi- and inter-disciplinary character of the innovation projects and the fact that the test environment covers the majority of the airport system, makes this fieldlab unique in itself.

The ATL-project will run for at least 3 years (2019-2022). Key activities include:

Development of fieldlab infrastructure to create a unique test & demonstration environment at Rotterdam The Hague Airport. An important element here is the “Open Airport Platform”, where partners can get access to and work with airport related data.
Execution of various innovation projects within 4 physical areas (airside, baggage, terminal & landside) making use of the Open Airport Platform, leading to improvements in sustainability, safety, capacity, efficiency, resilience, passenger comfort, etc. on an airport system level. Specific TU Delft projects focus on radar technology applications such as weather now-casting, agent-based modeling to improve terminal and baggage processes, and machine learning to improve airside planning.
Set-up of a knowledge development & dissemination program, where results of the innovation projects are shared and students from multiple education levels work on airport related challenges. In addition, start-ups will receive business support via the accelerator program.
TU Delft participates in all above activities, both from a research and education point of view. Several research positions (PhD’s and Postdocs) are funded with this subsidy.

Figure 1: Generic visualization of the Airport Technology Lab set-up (figure adjusted from the EFRO project proposal)

Available documents
• Internal presentation about the TUD-work packages. General overview of the work packages of the EFRO-proposal and the role of TU Delft.
• End exposition of Interactive Technology Design Course (2020) Multiple student groups of the Interactive Technology Design Course of the Industrial Design Faculty worked on an interesting challenge for the Airport Technology Lab. The end results can be found here.

The Airport Technology Lab is made possible by