Airport Experience® News - Food & Beverage Issue 2024

Right: The first project undertaken through Vancouver International’s Innovation Hub is a partnership with clean-tech company Moment Energy, which repurposes retired electric vehicle batteries.

“We’re able to run everything in the cloud,” he says. “They’re much more agile. We build in weeks, not months and years and our investments are low. We fail fast. So, it’s a different culture.” What’s next? Perhaps using location data, GPS data, landside data, passenger movement information and other factors to help operations staff make better decisions on TSA security lines, shopping, staffing and other customer experience-related movements. “We’re using a very pragmatic way to predict what’s going happen at the curbs, what’s going to happen on the landside, how do you run an operation with data and good algorithms,” he says. “It is a work in progress. This is never going to end. This is a continuous cycle where you are constantly reinventing, you’re fine-tuning.” Ongoing Innovation At YVR Vancouver International Airport (YVR) has a long history of benefiting the industry as a whole while discovering ways to improve its own operations, according to a spokesperson. The airport created the Innovation Hub at YVR in 2021, which “now plays an active role in creating and capturing new value for the aviation industry,” the spokesperson says. The hub uses the airport as a dynamic platform to test and trial new and sustainable technologies native to British Columbia in support of the local tech ecosystem. YVR’s Digital Twin, for example, is a real-time, virtual interactive replica of the terminal and airfield and other local areas that can be used as an adaptable learning environment. That resource has also been made available to other airports for enhancing their own digital transformations. The goals include becoming a global leader in sustainable aviation and achieving net zero carbon, facilitating industry growth in British Columbia, enhancing efficiency and digitization for its operation and supporting training and reskilling initiatives in the technology sector, particularly in partnership with

post-secondary academia and Indigenous communities, the spokesperson says. The Hub operates through an ecosystem approach, bringing various stakeholders together, including higher education, regulatory bodies, small- and medium sized businesses, commercial enterprises, advisory services, the public sector and Indigenous communities. Stakeholders engage through partnerships either by responding to operational challenges created by the airport or bringing their own ideas to the Hub for consideration. It’s been the first testbed for the Government of British Columbia’s Integrated Marketplace Program, which will generate product performance data in real world conditions that will be made available and used to help de-risk the adoption and purchase of domestic innovations so potential customers can understand return on investment, operational cost or greenhouse gas reduction possibilities. YVR’s Innovation Hub unveiled its first project in February when it announced a partnership with clean-tech company Moment Energy to deliver a new Battery Energy Storage System at the airport that repurposes retired electric vehicle batteries. “We’re thrilled to see practical solutions emerging from YVR’s Integrated Marketplace, thanks to innovations from within B.C.’s tech sector,” said YVR President and CEO Tamara Vrooman, in an announcement at the time. “The flexible

EV charging capacity from Moment Energy not only allows us to test different ways to charge our fleet, it also represents tangible progress toward our net-zero goals.” Industry Driving Innovation Much of the focus on innovation in the industry has run concurrently with the formation by the American Association of Airport Executives of its Airport Consortium on Transformation, a program uniting and driving industry solution providers to test solutions throughout the aviation sector. The current version includes buy in at the highest levels from D allas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (PHX), San Francisco International Airport (SFO) and others. It started seven years ago as an innovation accelerator and it drove many airport labs, says Carter Morris, AAAE’s executive vice president. Since the pandemic, the accelerator has shifted its focus to action, “identifying and standing up pilot programs, not just being an incubator and thinking about ideas or what we could be doing, but actually implanting it at airports around the country” he says, adding that there are a few reports expected soon on current projects. “The idea is that it’s the airports that are driving this, it needs to come from the top,” he says. “It’s a really exciting time.”

47

AX NEWS JUNE 2024