Heathrow partners with Databricks to optimise passenger flow

London Heathrow Airport (LHR/EGLL) has partnered with Data and AI company Databricks to optimise passenger flow through its terminals and improve passenger experience.

Heathrow sees around 82 million passengers per year flying or connecting from its five terminals providing around 26 TerraBytes (TB) of data which is used to make real-time decisions around the airport to optimise efficiency.

This data includes information on passenger numbers, flights, airlines, seasonal performance, as well as traffic and weather patterns which is crucial to ensuring the on-time efficiency of daily operations.

Databricks tools help to refine the airport’s approach to forecasting operational needs by using advanced AI and machine learning which has already led to a reduction of forecasting time from two weeks down to just a few hours.

“Data-driven, accurate forecasting is a non-negotiable in the travel and hospitality industry — with thousands of daily flights totally dependent on this being done right,” said Michael Green, VP, Head of Northern Europe at Databricks. “With the Data Intelligence Platform, Heathrow is able to understand future passenger volumes and plan accordingly, resulting in better service for passengers and a much more efficient operation.”

Databricks Key Areas

• Data governance: The airport is implementing data governance with Databricks Unity Catalog to secure its data and AI assets under a single permission model, thereby furthering safe and consistent data use across the airport.
• Compute power: With improved, remote computations, the airport can now scale quickly — allowing high-level forecasts to be distributed downstream in easy-to-digest, self-serve analytics. This new capability also drastically speeds up time to insights.
• Cross-team collaboration: Shareable code and insights via team-based notebooks foster cross-team collaboration. Furthermore, Heathrow integrated Power BI with Databricks to power dashboards and visualisations with the most up-to-date data for business reporting to improve decision-making.
• Certification capabilities: To efficiently scale internal adoption and use, Heathrow’s users are capitalising on the self-paced training and certification available through Databricks Academy.
• Model tracking and data sharing: Heathrow is also leveraging MLflow to track and promote its ML models from development to production. The team is also looking at Databricks Delta Sharing for data sharing with airlines, ground handlers and other Heathrow companies, and is in the early stages of establishing a centre of excellence to support its ongoing data and AI strategy.