HEATHROW AIRPORT

London’s Heathrow Airport has been an international travel and trade hub since 1955 and is one of the world’s busiest international airports. In recent years £11 billion has been invested in improving Heathrow Airport, including the opening of the new Terminal 5 in 2010 and the Queen’s Terminal (Terminal 2) in 2014. In 2019, the total number of passengers year was just under 80.9m.

Working as a trusted partner since May 2005, the Redcentric cloud team had already delivered a number of significant platform and software technology refreshes. These included:

Airport website, hosted, managed and supported under SLA’s of 99.95% availability and protected by DDoS and Intrusion Protection Services.
Flight Information Hub (FIHub), a single point of truth for passenger focussed flight and travel data

Amazon Alexa Skill, giving passengers access to flight information via this exciting interface
Android based Passenger Connections kiosk which was trialled in Terminals 2 and 3 and remains live

Increased website availability for passengers

Centralising data into a single source for passengers

Cost efficiencies through modern, effective cloud solution

Challenges

Heathrow’s Flight Information Hub, which had been providing real-time passenger information since 2015, was approaching the end of its life. It was increasingly difficult to enhance and modernise.

Heathrow needed a modern, effective replacement to this critical system that:

Reduced hosting costs
Improved functionality
Increased solution flexibility and scalability

How Redcentric helped:

A new system was designed which would be built on Microsoft Azure.

Key features of the new solution included:

Native cloud functionality
Multi-region deployment, running in an active-active state for resilience
Proactive monitoring, using real time alerts and dashboards
Synthetic traffic, for active monitoring and validation of application real-time behaviour
Serverless code deployment, to support rapid scaling under load and eliminate underutilised infrastructure provisioning
Azure COSMOS DB, for resilience, scalability and global data replication using an eventual consistency model
Self-Recovery, to detect data inconsistencies and initiate automatic recovery
Provision of RESTful APIs via Azure API Management
A fully documented self-service developer interface
Integration and processing of data from multiple sources
The merging of three different flight data sources, to get the passengers’ viewpoint

This was an easy one as Redcentric have acted with a competent, proactive approach exhibiting a ‘can do’ attitude throughout the engagement. It’s always a pleasure to do business with a professional engineering team.

Business benefits

The new platform was launched in May 2020. All subscribers were migrated and all legacy systems were decommissioned by July 2020.

Key benefits included:

Reduced costs – reduced hosting costs by 85%, managed service costs by 35%, overall Opex costs reduced by 64%
Scalability – proven to meet the demand of passenger and operational subscribers
Integration – eased integration for new subscribers
Future-proof – a foundation for future use-cases, including customer data feeds for sponsored terminals and off-campus information boards

Cloud

Professional services

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