Cork Airport’s AI success story: From congested to smooth curbside experience in 20 days

About Cork Airport

Cork Airport is the international gateway to the South of Ireland and stands as the country’s second busiest and best-connected international airport, offering flights to destinations across the UK and Continental Europe. Its commitment to excellence is reflected in the multiple ACI Europe Best Airport Awards it has received in its category, serving approximately 3 million annual passengers.

Summary

Recognizing the advantages of a unified AI solution for capturing passenger journey data, Cork Airport turned to Zensors to alleviate curbside congestion. Leveraging the existing camera infrastructure and the advanced capabilities of the Zensors AI platform hosted in the AWS, the transition to proactive curbside management was accomplished in a mere 20 days from the initial request to using the data in the field.

As a result, the airport saved approximately 87 hours of curbside congestion and minimized short-term parking revenue loss from congestion over approximately 4 months during the summer of 2023. With Zensors AI, Cork's operational leaders now have real-time access to a comprehensive overview of the passenger journey right on their smartphones.

The background

Duty managers and Car Park staff oversee the entire forecourt and airport campus, not just the curbside. Given the vast area, it's challenging for the team to monitor the congestion level at all times, often noticing issues only when they've escalated.

The curbside system at Cork is split into two main lanes:

• In-lane (Public Transit & Taxis): Taxi shortages in this lane often lead to long passenger wait times. When this happens, more taxis are called in.
• Out-lane (Private Cars): This lane has a barrier system with automatic plate recognition. Drivers staying over 15 minutes get charged. Drivers having payment issues or experience system hiccups can cause traffic backups, requiring Car Park staff intervention.

The issues with reactive curbside management

Reactive curbside management was particularly challenging and stressful for Car Park staff. They would only become aware of congestion after it had persisted for 5 -10 minutes, usually from calls by stressed drivers.

Predicting when congestion would occur due to double parking, exit barrier issues, or other reasons was also difficult, making it unclear if and when staff should be on-site.

These situations could have been prevented if the Car Park staff had been alerted earlier. However, in the absence of proactive alerts, they often found themselves having to:

• Resolve issues while more cars accumulated behind problematic vehicles, adding an extra 15-25 minutes of congestion.
• Temporarily alleviate congestion by lifting the exit barriers, at the expense of parking revenue.

“Before Zensors, our Car Park staff were often overwhelmed and reactive when dealing with a congested curbside.”

Darran Dineen – IT Manager at Cork Airport

The need for proactive curbside management

An unexpected challenge

In March 2022, Cork launched a new IT initiative to improve passenger experience. Drivers picking up their friends can get active alerts on flight status to know where people are down to the minute. This inadvertently led to more congestion around the arrival time as people would arrive at the same time on a single lane.

Building on trust and past experience with Zensors

The business team at Cork had already experienced the benefits of Zensors AI queue alerts in their operations. Their past experience with proactive tools gave them confidence that real-time alerts could address their congestion issues. “Queue alerts also allow us to quickly address issues before they escalate,” said Roy O’Driscoll, Deputy Managing Director at Cork. They turned to Zensors knowing its technology ensures a swift and successful deployment.

Cork’s objective

• Proactive curbside management: Provide staff with accurate data tools to anticipate and handle congestion, especially for taxis and transit.
• Minimal disruptions: Sidestep any solutions that demand heavy construction or would force big shifts in how the team currently operates.
• Leverage existing cameras: Address challenges like occlusion and low visibility using cameras already installed in distant forecourt areas.

Highlights

5 key achievements

Zensors met each of Cork’s objectives and rapidly deployed a solution resulting in the following achievements:

• Enabled proactive curbside management using preemptive text message alerts using accurate, easy-to-use AI data trusted by the Cork curbside team.
• Achieved a 20-day remote AI deployment with existing cameras and infrastructure, from initial request to end-user onboarding.
• Reduced the need to lift exit barriers and minimized parking revenue loss.
• The AI reached targeted User Acceptance Test (UAT) in just 8 days, accurately tracking car counts and congestion levels where other measurement tools are prone to fail.
• Offered a live snapshot of taxi queues, traffic congestion, and car counts to the selected users with the right level of permission.

What Cork team is saying

“The pre-emptive notifications of congestion building up on the public forecourt gives our team valuable time… we can be proactive rather than reactive in terms of minimising congestion time particularly around exits and lost revenue through barrier lifts is reduced.”

Car Park Manager at Cork airport

“…I am particularly happy with the impact this has made in our forecourt… The introduction has meant that our forecourt generally flows freely and problems are addressed immediately.” 

Roy O’Driscoll – Deputy Managing Director at Cork Airport

"With accurate, easy-to-use data, and preemptive alerts when vehicle numbers are rising,  our staff are now proactively managing congestion levels for taxis and transit. We're seeing drastic improvements in congestion levels and heightened satisfaction across staff, passengers, and drivers…” 

Darran Dineen – IT Manager at Cork Airport

The impact: Saved 87 hours of congestion

This summer alone, Cork Airport managed to save approximately 87 hours of unnoticed congestion, thanks to the proactive measures implemented.

From June 16 to October 6, 2023, a total of 699 notifications were triggered. Each of these notifications represents a proactive intervention that prevents 5-10 minutes of unnoticed congestion. 

This duration represents the typical time lapse before the Car Park team would start receiving calls from stressed drivers in a reactive management scenario.

Examining the revenue impact:

Zensors AI, as part of a comprehensive strategy that includes ANPR camera integration, Car Park system upgrades, and the introduction of WhatsApp alerts, has contributed to enhancing the forecourt experience. This collaborative initiative has demonstrated an overall positive impact in short-term parking revenue.  The Zensors AI solution helped Cork do this by greatly minimizing the time the Car Park staff had to simply raise the barrier to relieve congestion which resulted in significantly reducing revenue loss 

How Zensors AI made a difference

Traditionally, airports face two major hurdles when seeking real-time data:

• Infrastructure overhaul: Many solutions like Lidar, LPR, WIFI, or beacons demand extensive infrastructure changes, leading to high costs, such as digging roads and adding cables. Zensors, on the other hand, utilizes the airport's existing camera systems. This makes Zensors AI solution not only cost-effective but environmentally-friendly, saving unnecessary waste and resources.
• Costly and lengthy implementations: Adopting airport tech solutions can be expensive, often running into millions, and some projects can drag on for years. Even after installation, some AI solutions or video analytics software requires months of “calibration” time to build custom analytics.

With Zensors, airports can enjoy swift deployment aligned with sustainability initiatives within weeks, as seen with Cork, thanks to proprietary AI technologies. 

Momenta AI’s adaptive learning

Zensors' AI has been trained on a multitude of airport curbside scenes from around the world. With its vast foundational understanding, it delivers reliable performance right from the start. It then achieves outstanding accuracy by adapting to specific environments within days.

In Cork's case, the AI rapidly grasped the unique camera angles and vehicle sizes, ensuring precision tailored to the airport's specific needs without starting from scratch.

Hologram AI

Traditional video analytics software and AI solutions often require lengthy calibration to prevent issues like double counting from multiple cameras or differentiating data from overlapping zones.

Once cameras are assigned to specific zones in the curbside area, Zensors’ Hologram AI automates this process. The AI transforms individual cameras into AI agents that report operational issues and bottlenecks, ensuring accuracy without the need for calibration or manual intervention.

“Zensors has been an extremely agile tool for Cork Airport as we emerged from Covid and reached full recovery in 2023… Zensors enabled us to get an extremely accurate system up and running very quickly by interfacing into our current CCTV infrastructure.”

Roy O’Driscoll – Deputy Managing Director at Cork Airport