How Schipol Airport improved reliability of its current baggage handling lines

Amsterdam Airport Schipol is continuously investing in technology to improve reliability

Amsterdam Airport Schiphol is the third largest airport in Europe, serving over 70 million passengers each year. With the ambition to be Europe’s preferred airport—the airport of choice for travelers, airlines and logistics service providers alike—Schiphol is continuously investing in technology to improve passenger experience, safety and overall reliability.

Schipol was looking to improve baggages handling lines

A constant stream of passengers travel through Schiphol every day. And what do passengers bring with them? Baggage, and lots of it. One of Schiphol’s main challenges is to ensure that the capacity of its baggage handling systems is sufficient. Because physical constraints limit the potential to expand the system, Schiphol must focus on improving the availability and reliability of its current baggage handling lines.

The role of conditioning based monitoring in an industry where downtimes are not acceptable

”Schiphol has a large number of critical assets and downtime is unacceptable,” says Marcel den Blanken, one of Schiphol’s baggage service managers. “That is why we were looking for a condition monitoring solution to help us improve the reliability and availability of critical equipment.”

“To effectively deal with our challenges, we created an extensive list of requirements for the monitoring solution. Samotics’ SAM4 solution ticked all our boxes: it could provide actionable information about the state of our conveyors, detect faults at least five days before failure, was easy to install and maintain, and was scalable,” says Den Blanken.

Samotics provided full support to Schiphol in this process, helping to identify the most appropriate equipment to monitor, familiarization with using the SAM4 platform and clear guidance for installation. “Because SAM4 installs inside the motor control cabinet, we were able to deploy across a large number of assets at minimal cost,” says Pieter Bakker, a baggage service manager at Schiphol. Installation activities could also be performed in a short timeframe without any major infrastructure changes and fitting around Schiphol’s operational procedures.

The baggage handling system plays a crucial role in our ability to provide passengers with an excellent travel experience. That’s why we continually invest in innovative solutions that allow us to improve our reliability and performance.

Ronald Wever, baggage cluster manager, Schiphol

The system was up and running within four weeks

Once SAM4’s IoT hardware was installed, the system began collecting continuous high-quality data, which was processed on Samotics’ AI-driven analytics platform. It took about four weeks to develop individual models for the monitored assets via an automated learning cycle. Once the learning stage was completed, SAM4 was ready to detect upcoming failures around the clock.

100% detection accuracy over the course of 12-months

During the 12-month trial period, SAM4 achieved a perfect score, detecting 9 developing faults well in advance and missing none. Samotics performed regular milestone reviews with Schiphol during this trial period to help optimize the use of the analytics platform.

“The real-time information SAM4 provided about the condition of our conveyor system allowed us to schedule maintenance before breakdowns occurred,” says Schiphol’s Bakker. “At first I was a bit skeptical about SAM4’s ability to detect failures by analyzing electrical waveforms, but the results speak for themselves: it just works.”

Whats’ Next

“SAM4 has proven to be accurate, reliable and easy to use,” Schiphol’s Wever says. “Based on the results of the trial period, we’re expanding SAM4 across our production system. Over the next couple of months, we’ll work with Samotics to deploy SAM4 at scale, while continuing to use SAM4’s insights in our day-to-day operations.” With SAM4 having simple installation and implementation procedures, this enabled Samotics to support Schiphol in scaling up in a short timeframe.

Early detections enable us to create timely work orders, so that issues are attended to at night–without interruptions to the system and our passengers.

Marcel den Blanken, baggage service manager, Schiphol