FOUNDATION FRAMEWORK
Maximising the value of our data whilst maintaining security has always been a priority.
With Databricks, Heathrow now has the capability required for advanced AI and ML use cases – starting with its passenger flow forecasting model. In just a year, Heathrow sped up forecast insights from two weeks to four hours while decreasing the margin of error from 30 % to 10 %, allowing the airport to become more efficient and accelerate productivity.
With its forecasting model in Databricks, the airport can plan predictive maintenance, cleaning and service interruptions during downtime to reduce costs and better avoid impacts on travellers. As a result, their teams are better prepared for peak travel periods so they can also proactively manage efficient passenger flow.
“ Databricks enables us to provide a more efficient and accurate forecast than we’ ve ever been able to before. Now, passengers and stakeholders get a greater level of service in a much more efficient airport,” said Andrew Isenman, Head of Technology, Cloud and Data at Heathrow.
Streamlining data processing for accurate forecasting
With the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, Heathrow was able to simplify its data architecture, improve security, and more efficiently conduct analytics and AI, which allowed its data teams to focus on opportunities to innovate on its business and customer experience. Other key success areas include:
• Data governance: The airport is implementing data governance with Databricks Unity Catalog to secure its data and AI assets under a single permission model, thereby furthering safe and consistent data use across the airport.
• Compute power: With improved, remote computations, the airport can now scale quickly – allowing high-level forecasts to be distributed downstream in easy-to-digest, self-serve analytics. This new capability also drastically speeds up time to insights.
• Cross-team collaboration: Shareable code and insights via team-based notebooks fosters cross-team collaboration. Furthermore, Heathrow integrated Power BI with Databricks to power dashboards and visualisations with the most up-to-date data for business reporting to improve decision making.
• Certification capabilities: To efficiently scale internal adoption and use, Heathrow’ s users are capitalising on the self-paced training and certification available through Databricks Academy.
• Model tracking and data sharing: Heathrow is also leveraging MLflow to track and promote its ML models from development to production. The team is also looking at Databricks Delta Sharing for data sharing with airlines, ground handlers and other Heathrow companies, and is in the early stages of establishing a centre of excellence to support its ongoing data and AI strategy.
“ Data-driven, accurate forecasting is a nonnegotiable in the travel and hospitality industry – with thousands of daily flights totally dependent on this being done right,” said Michael Green, VP, Head of Northern Europe at Databricks.“ With the Data Intelligence Platform, Heathrow is able
18 www. intelligentbuild. tech