February 22, 2017

IoT in Airline Operations

About United

§ 339 Destinations in 54 Countries

§ 212 Domestic / 127 International

§ 9 Hubs (Chicago, Denver, Guam, Houston, Los Angeles, Newark, San Francisco, Tokyo, Washington, D.C.)

§ 4,523 Daily Departures

§ 143 Million passengers in 2016

§ Fleet Size: 738 Mainline / 566 United Express

IoT Layers – From sensors to apps

Things – Sensors, Devices etc.

Connectivity – Communications, protocols, networks etc.

Infrastructure – Public cloud, private DC, hybrid etc.

Data Ingestion – Event processing, storage etc.

Data Analysis – Data mining, machine learning etc.

Applications – Reporting, Sensing applications

People & Processes – Improving Customer Experience

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Things Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Beacons

§ Low-energy “smart” Bluetooth beacons broadcast information that can be received by nearby smartphones

§ Current beacons identify that a handset is adjacent to a specific beacon Upcoming Bluetooth standards improve on precision

§ Range: 1M-30M, 2-Dimensional***Sub 1 meter precision locations broadcast in the works

Things Geocoded High Resolution Indoor Maps

Application Indoor Navigation with blue-dot experience

Data Ingestion Event Processing and Storage

AWS cloud

Amazon API Gateway

Airports

CEP Processor

Amazon Kinesis

AWSS3 Storage

Amazon API Gateway

DBDashboards

iBeacon

Infrastructure Elastic infrastructure running in cloud

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Infrastructure Elastic infrastructure running in cloud

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Infrastructure Elastic infrastructure running in cloud

Data Analysis TSA Wait Times

Data Analysis TSA Wait Times Cont.

Data Analysis Predicting TSA Wait TimesEvent Processing with Machine Learning Models using Long short-term memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)

Application Airplane Turn Management / Task tracking

Application Wheelchair App

Application Future Potential Use cases

§ Context aware guidance/help§ Ground Fleet Management§ Aircraft activity tracking§ Deicing equipment planning and resource management

Thank Yousuresh.subasinghe@united.com