Real-time insights keep airport operations running smoothly

Airports rarely slow down. Every delayed flight, unexpected passenger surge or change in weather can trigger a ripple effect across baggage handling, staffing, security checkpoints and gate operations. At the world’s busiest aviation hubs, even a few minutes’ delay can make a significant difference.

For airport operators, this scenario is further complicated by growing passenger volumes, industry-wide staffing shortages, and legacy IT systems that can hinder airline and ground crew communications. To stay resilient, they need to modernize how they manage real-time data to improve day-to-day decision-making and ensure frictionless passenger journeys.

Fraport AG, a global airport operator that manages Frankfurt Airport in Germany, keeps operations running smoothly by making fast, informed decisions backed by accurate data. That’s no small task; the company oversees nearly 30 airports worldwide and manages a highly intricate ecosystem involving airlines, retailers, cargo operators, ground crews and millions of travelers.

To better coordinate movements within the system, Fraport has expanded its use of advanced analytics and cloud technology. With SAS Viya on Microsoft Azure, the organization is modernizing forecasting, automating thousands of analytics jobs and improving access to real-time operational data across the business.

“Our vision is to bring data together, analyze it across the entire process and provide better service to the passengers,” says Dieter Steinmann, Vice President of Administrative IT Applications at Fraport AG. “We’re responsible for the full life cycle of different business applications, and analytics helps us keep everything running smoothly.”

Analytics as core operational capability

Fraport has relied on SAS for more than two decades. Over time, its use of analytics evolved from reporting and forecasting into a core operational capability supporting passenger services, staffing, baggage handling and infrastructure management.

As airport operations became more dynamic, Fraport needed a more scalable and collaborative analytics environment. The company migrated from SAS®9 to SAS Viya as part of a larger cloud transformation initiative built on Microsoft Azure.

According to Wolfgang Standhaft, Senior Executive Vice President, Information and Telecommunications at Fraport AG, “the migration was a big step forward in Fraport’s cloud journey.”  Running SAS Viya on Microsoft Azure allows the company to use Microsoft Entra ID and other authorization tools while improving collaboration between IT teams and business users. The cloud-native environment also gives analysts faster access to data and greater flexibility in managing analytics workloads.

Today, approximately 120 analysts across multiple business areas use SAS Viya daily,

supported by a large network of automated jobs that deliver forecasting and reporting insights across the business.

Forecasting passenger and cargo movement in real time

Fraport uses SAS Viya to forecast passenger and cargo flows and improve coordination across airport operations. By combining flight schedules, radar data and aircraft ground movement information, the company generates more accurate forecasts that support staffing decisions, gate coordination and baggage handling.

SAS is used in the data preparation phase of both Fraport’s baggage handling system and turnaround management, as well as the Intelligent Dispatch Agent (IDA), a reinforcement learning system that autonomously assigns loading crews to flights based on schedules, taxi times, crew qualifications and shift constraints.

“Our colleagues from ground handling need a better prediction – to a granularity of two-minute intervals – because they need to begin unloading baggage within 10 minutes,” Steinmann explains. “It’s a relatively complex thing because you have to consider when people arrive at the airport, how fast they move and how quickly they pass through each process point.”

Using SAS Viya, Fraport can more accurately predict when aircraft will arrive at gates and simulate how passengers move through security and border checkpoints. “Being a hub means you must ensure that arriving passengers reach their departure gates seamlessly,” says Standhaft. “That requires significant effort in passenger flow analysis and simulation to make sure that passengers –and their baggage – get from point A to point B and don’t miss their flights.”

The same forecasting capabilities help optimize cargo operations. Frankfurt Airport handles millions of tons of cargo annually, requiring precise coordination between multiple handlers and transportation providers. “In Frankfurt alone, we handle approximately 2 million tons of cargo each year,” says Standhaft. “SAS Viya helps us a lot in making that frictionless and seamless.”

Delivering faster insights through automation

Real-time forecasting depends on continuously updated data. Fraport uses SAS Viya to automate data processing and analytics workflows, ensuring analysts and operational teams have access to current information.

The organization integrates data from 25 databases into SAS Viya and runs more than 2,000 automated jobs, many of them as micro-batches every few minutes, according to Standhaft. “Our analysts always have up-to-date data, which they can merge and use for further analysis across both real-time and historical scenarios.”

The centralized analytics environment supports decision-making across departments while reducing manual work for analytics teams.

“SAS took a lot of daily work from our shoulders,” Standhaft says. “That frees up creative potential within our analyst teams to create better and improved solutions for our business users.”

Building the foundation for AI

Digital transformation is central to Fraport’s long-term strategy. The company sees AI and advanced analytics playing an increasingly important role in improving operational efficiency, enhancing passenger experience and creating more agile ways of working across its global airport network. Already, its IDA is being implemented at the Frankfurt Airport, the first airport in the world to let AI make decisions that directly affect flight operations.

“The future role of SAS Viya in the AI arena will be twofold,” says Standhaft. “It allows us to use a lot of in-built tools like Coding Assistant and other tools that come with SAS Viya out of the box. It also significantly improves the quality and structure of our data.”

For Fraport, building a strong data foundation is as important as adopting new AI capabilities. Better-quality, well-structured data supports future automation, predictive analytics and more informed decision-making while helping the organization reduce costs, increase agility and identify new revenue opportunities.