Scalability – The airport needed a solution that was flexible and could scale to accommodate hundreds of PLCs and hundreds of thousands of tags without compromising stability. Part of the solution includes alarm-based SCADA navigation and situational awareness controls which were only possible with Ignition.
The airport also needed a SCADA system that is geographically aware of its equipment such that situational awareness can be designated and managed. Innovation – The airport will feature the first and largest early baggage storage system in North America and this required some innovative design around the communication protocols and graphical depictions. The customer needed an industry-leading solution that could handle several thousand pieces of equipment with ease.
Performance – The legacy software was experiencing a large number of latency issues, thereby causing situational awareness of the operators and baggage handlers to decline over the years. Ignition was selected for these key reasons:Ībstractive Design – Due to the various legacy systems in place, a platform that could allow the abstraction of various structural (displays, pop-ups, UX flow, tags, alarms), logical (PLCs, areas, process areas), and architectural (gateways/clients per area per terminal) types was necessary. Ignition is the perfect platform to give the airport a true off-the-shelf solution for expansion in the future. SmartSort is a configurable baggage sortation solution that allows the airport to meet its future expansion requirements. The new system installed by Brock Solutions was a combination of Ignition and SmartSort (Brock’s software for baggage sortation and reporting).
This made the software very hard (and expensive) to support, upgrade and maintain. Each system had been built by different teams using different design principles. The previous upper level/SCADAs were provided by a variety of vendors over the past 15 years using different, disconnected technologies (seven different independent SCADA systems, built on three different platforms). The first step in this critical program was to replace the existing systems with a single upper level/SCADA system that would serve as the new heart of airport baggage operations. This project went into live operation in March 2020.Īs part of its Baggage 2025 program, the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) had a vision to modernize their baggage handling systems.
This project was an upper level/HMI replacement of the baggage handling systems of both Terminals 1 and 3 at Toronto Pearson International Airport. Toronto Airport Moves from Seven SCADA Systems to One