Heathrow Airport partners with Databricks
Heathrow, the UK’s international gateway and largest airport in Europe, has chosen the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to unify and govern its data and AI and 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.
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.
Heathrow chose to centralise its data and AI on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform on Microsoft Azure. 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 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 the 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.
“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.”
