Daifuku’s visualisation and simulation approach to baggage handling

Sym3 on multiple devices

Why is it useful to be able to simulate and verify BHS design?

We find that doing a simulation is not only necessary to ensure the system has the required capacity, but also to engage all stakeholders including operations, maintenance and management. A simulation greatly helps people to understand how the system will operate, eliminate risks of misunderstanding and facilitate training and handover to operations.

What challenges has pre-installation testing highlighted?

The emulation platform allows Daifuku to test the entire low-level and high-level controls solution together. This emulation stage is critical to our process and highlights many challenges that are best faced in the lab rather than onsite.

Firstly, emulation will highlight all integration and communications issues before hitting site. Secondly, it allows to run end to end scenarios to validate the material flow, but also the business intelligence and reporting. This is a great time to perform all necessary adjustment or addition to the system to make it more usable and provide more meaningful reporting data. The emulation allows us to perform many tests repetitively that would be impractical to do on the physical system like high throughput testing and run an entire shift with real flight schedule.

How has Sym3 been received in the industry to date?

The feedback is extremely positive, and we keep improving the product with our users’ suggestions. Whilst we offer Sym3 as our Thibaut Caplain, Executive General Manager – Software at Daifuku BCS standard package, our customers ultimately decide what package they want to use. Sym3 is a full commercial SCADA package, supplied with an editor so that any SCADA engineer can edit, maintain and improve the SCADA as the baggage handling system is modified and upgraded. It is built on standard OPC interface, this means that our customers know they are not locked in and can replace the SCADA with any off-the-shelf package if they wish to do so.

Sym3 was built in very close collaboration with airports and is now in operations in more than 25 terminals, and many other sites. The operators find that the bag tracking functionality changes the way to operate and allow them to make better decision in real time to reduce downtime and improve in‑system-time. The record/ replay functionality is also very popular to assist root cause analysis and help stakeholders understand impacts of certain faults or operational decisions. Large airports make full use of the 3D rendering to help their staff better apprehend the often complex layout, while smaller airport find that Sym3 running on a simple HMI, together mobile iPhone/Android clients provide full SCADA functionalities and great flexibility of operations