The newspaper El País reports on the mobile application developed by Aena and Telefónica with Carto and Situm technology. This APP allows passengers to know their location indoors and calculate the duration of the route to stores, check-in counters, or boarding gates, resulting in a “Google Maps for airports.”
Already available at Madrid-Barajas Airport Adolfo Suarez, this application “allows the passenger not only to know their location at all times within the airport, but also to browse the maps of the terminals, look for points of interest (such as boarding gates, restaurants or stores) and, above all, calculate the best route to reach the destination inside the airfield, indicating the distance and approximate duration of the journey.”
This application for passenger guidance is part of Aena’s digitalization process, one of the pillars of its strategic plan.
Joint effort between AENA, Telefónica, Carto, and Situm
Journalist Ramón Muñoz describes the collective effort to create AenaMaps, an application that uses technology developed by Situm Indoor Positioning and Carto. It is already available for both Android and iOS users.
Considering that GPS is valid for exteriors, the interior of buildings presents certain challenges. To overcome them, AENA Maps uses the IPS (Indoor Positioning System), “a system that triangulates the signal from the passenger’s cell phone, using both the GPS and the airport’s wifi network and adding some Bluetooth beacons distributed at different points inside the airport”. This is where Carto, a location intelligence platform, comes in, providing the cartographic enrichment of the maps, route development and coordination of the solution, and Situm Indoor Positioning, with its specialized system for indoor location and navigation for geopositioning inside airports.
More features
As we said, although AENA Maps, this Google Maps for airports, is already available for use in Madrid, the team will continue to work on expanding its functionalities to be able to “report the duration in real-time of the passage through the security filters or offering support to passengers with reduced mobility. The ultimate goal is to offer a door-to-door service, that is, the traveler can trace the complete path from its origin -home or office- to the boarding gate.”
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