M2mi Blog Travel Smart - The Industrial Internet Consortium Testbed

The travel industry has put the pressure on. The travelling public has put the pressure on. IATA - the international air travel association - has listened. All airlines have to be much smarter about how they handle passenger luggage and they have to do that by June 2018. IATA Resolution 753 specifies that airlines must be able to track bags from check-in to collection with particular emphasis on change of custody between aircraft, airlines and airports. All aimed at cutting down the number of lost or misrouted bags which, in turn, saves the airlines money.Most airlines see better baggage handling as a very strong customer service and customer experience issue. It's not just about preventing a bag going astray or raising an alert when it does, it's also about providing fast, up-to-date information to passengers using mobiles and smartphones - giving them confidence through always being able to tell them where their checked-in luggage is and saving them time and frustration at check-in and pick-up. Many airlines have been experimenting with RFID enabled baggage tags - some with traditional paper bag tags with embedded RFID chips and some with smart bag tags with electronic ink displays. Some airlines are now rolling out solutions including Delta; some are close to doing that and some airports, such as Hong Kong, have equipped all airline check-in desks with the ability to produce RFID embedded bag tags making baggage routing there much more reliable.The customer side of bag tracking goes much further too. It feeds into airline enterprise applications for passenger management and customer service. It allows for a significant boost in customer satisfaction through value-add services throughout the passenger's journey. But there is also a downside. The smarter the end device gets - in this case the bag tag - the more likely it is to represent an intrusion point and a place for a hacker to break into the airline or airports networks. Imagine the scale of the issue when an airline is dealing with millions of bags a year or an airport is dealing with tens of millions of bags a year.Passengers expect more and better services as the IoT market delivers smart communicating devices to do pretty much anything. In the case of airline baggage handling the next step is smart GPS based cellular capable trackers. These devices, which can be built into a bag (some already are) or can be a separate device dropped inside a bag, can show the exact location of the bag at all times through GPS. RFID bag tags can only be read by an RFID reader and hence you only know when the bag previously went by a reader. It's not up-to-date and real-time.GPS bag trackers also have additional capabilities including measuring temperature, altitude and weight. Very useful, for example, if anything in the bag is temperature sensitive and extremely useful when you want to know if the weight of a bag changed because something was added in to it or taken out of it. All these play even further into the airlines' and the airports' opportunity for value-added customer services but the smarter the tracker the more vulnerable it can be to intrusions without robust security.GE, M2Mi and Oracle have recognized the issues inherent in an enterprise level and enterprise scale baggage handling and baggage management solution. One that caters for smart bag tags with both RFID and GPS tracking capabilities, can track anytime and anywhere and geo-fence bags, can raise alerts to airlines and passengers, can address the access and data security issues and can integrate with major airline ecosystem applications such as GE's Predix and Oracle's Airline Data Model. The three companies put forward a proposal to the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), of which all are members, to build an IIC testbed for smart airline baggage management. With the integration skills of Infosys and Altoros, the team has started building the now IIC approved testbed with the first fruits of this shown at Oracle's OpenWorld in San Francisco in September and IoT World Congress in Barcelona, Spain in October. M2Mi has a key role in the testbed as it is not only providing the "on-ramp" for all of the location and tracking enabled bag tags to both GE and Oracle applications, it is also implementing an IoT Security Suite in the testbed that M2Mi is building for the Department of Homeland Security. As a part of the IIC testbed, this will secure the "end points" by providing state-of-the-art encryption for small form factor devices, such as smart bags tags. In addition, it will deliver device identity management for IoT devices such as airline bag tags to complement the existing "people" identity management systems used by DHS, TSA and CPB.In the testbed GE Predix will be handling all of the real-time data and alerts collected and pre-processed by M2Mi's M2M Intelligence SaaS Cloud application. This allows GE Predix to record all of the baggage tracking data and allows Altoros to build a baggage web application for airlines, baggage handling companies and passengers, including mobile, to present all of the data collected and analyzed on the GE Predix platform. Altoros have previously built a proof of concept baggage handling application for RFID enabled bags.Oracle is providing their Airline Data Model (OADM) where all of the passenger information, frequent flyer information and baggage information will be stored. Running on top of this are Oracle's customer service and customer experience applications used by airlines to interact with their customers directly, through the web and through social media. Again, M2Mi is collecting and providing all of the baggage data and in this case InfoSys is handling the systems integration work between the M2Mi application, Oracle's applications and GE Predix and also providing web applications that will help bring the overall solution together. In combination, the IIC testbed is delivering an end-to-end smart baggage management solution that integrates the various necessary components and applications from across the airline ecosystem approached from a secure enterprise application perspective. It brings together the combined experience of the team members, a complete set of products and services and takes account of both the IATA supported RFID baggage handling proposals and the start-of-the-art GPS and cellular enabled trackers favored by those that want to know exactly where a bag is and where it has been at all times - including passengers, airlines, baggage handling companies, DHS, TSA and CBP.