Heathrow, the UK’s international gateway and Europe’s largest airport has chosen the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to help predict and manage passenger flow.

As one of the world’s best-connected airports welcoming over 82 million passengers and handling over 460,000 flights annually, Heathrow relies on over 26TB of data to make critical real-time decisions.

This includes data on passenger numbers, flights, airlines, seasonal performance, as well as traffic and weather patterns — all of which are crucial to power daily flights.

The airport chose to centralise its data and AI on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform on Microsoft Azure.

Prior to partnering with Databricks, Heathrow already had impressive forecasting capabilities. However, the airport wanted to do more to realise the full potential of forecasting by refining its approach to data and AI, with tools for user education, data governance and security, and machine learning (ML) model training.

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.

Creating a more efficient airport experience with the Data Intelligence Platform

Built on a lakehouse architecture, the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform provides an open, unified foundation for all data and governance and is powered by a Data Intelligence Engine that understands an organisation’s unique data.

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,” said Andrew Isenman, Head of Technology, Cloud and Data at Heathrow.

Now, passengers and stakeholders get a greater level of service in a much more efficient airport.”

Streamlining data processing for accurate forecasting

The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform enables Heathrow 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 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 foster 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 non-negotiable 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 to understand future passenger volumes and plan accordingly, resulting in better service for passengers and a much more efficient operation.”

Databricks will bring together a community of data and AI leaders from across the UK at its flagship Data and AI World Tour on September 11, 2024.

Hosted at the ExCeL Centre in London, the first of eight World Tour events in Europe will showcase how data-forward customers are innovating with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. See registration details here.