How Schipol Airport improved the reliability of its 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 70million passengers each year. With the ambition to be Europe’s preferred airport chosen by travellers, airlines and logistics service providers alike, Schiphol invests in technology to improve passenger experience, safety and reliability. One key priority is improving the capacity and reliability of its baggage handling systems. Day in – day out, a constant stream of passengers arrive with large volumes of baggage.  Since physical constraints limit the potential of expanding the baggage handling system, Schiphol focuses on maximising the efficiency and reliability of its existing baggage handling lines.

The role of condition-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, along with training on 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, baggage Service Manager at Schiphol. Installation activities could also be performed in a short timeframe without any major infrastructure changes and fitted around Schiphol’s operational procedures.

From installation to monitoring within four weeks

Once the SAM4 IoT hardware was installed, a continuous flow of high-quality data was processed on Samotics’ analytics platform. It took four weeks to complete the automated learning cycle for each monitored asset. After this learning stage, SAM4 was ready to detect developing failures around the clock. 

100% detection accuracy within 12-months

During an initial 12-month trial period, SAM4 achieved a perfect score, detecting 9 developing faults well in advance and missing zero known faults. Samotics performed regular milestone reviews with Schiphol during this trial period to optimise the use of the analytics platform.

“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,” said Marcel den Blanken, Baggage Service Manager at Schiphol.

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.” Thanks to SAM4’s straightforward installation and implementation, Samotics has been able to support Schiphol in scaling up the monitoring of its industrial assets quickly.

“The real-time information SAM4 provided allowed us to schedule maintenance before breakdowns occurred. 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.”

Pieter Bakker, Baggage Service Manager, Schipol Airport