
Baggage Handling System – Schiphol Airport [video] - curtis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv-Y0-ruzi8&feature=youtu.be
======
masida
This reminds me of one of my first programming jobs as external consultant for
the Baggage Handling System at Schiphol in 2000/2001, I was 17 years old.

My employer at that time was using MS Excel to parse the log files of all
sensors of the predecessor/older part of the system that is shown in this
video. I told her that I could probably do it 10,000 times faster by creating
a simple program in Visual Basic.

Visual Basic was way too slow on our "high-end" Pentium laptop to parse that
many 1MB log files, so I rewrote it in C++ (learned it on the job)[1]. The
managers got insight in the performance of the various components of the
system which they never dreamed of having (they were hardly aware that the
system was creating this detailed log messages).

By the way, the system is developed (at least partly) by Vanderlande [2].

[1] Took me a couple of days, probably even weeks back then. I would write the
code in 1 or 2 hours now.

[2] [https://www.vanderlande.com/](https://www.vanderlande.com/)

------
david-given
Is there a version without the edits? Because I found this practically
unwatchable; it kept cutting away just as things started to get interesting.

~~~
mike_hearn
This video of the T5 system at Heathrow is better and shows equipment just as
cool (though no robot at the end)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn8qogHH9bM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn8qogHH9bM)

Oh and if you want a REALLY crazy version of the Schipol video, this one is
actually a 360 degree live draggable version of it - no kidding!

[http://www.schiphol.nl/Reizigers/OpSchiphol/Bagage/BagageVid...](http://www.schiphol.nl/Reizigers/OpSchiphol/Bagage/BagageVideo.htm)

~~~
david-given
The first one isn't an FPV... and the second one is _also_ full of edits!

------
codejoust
Was looking for some backgrojnd and found an overview presentation [pdf]:
[http://netlipse.eu/media/77918/11nwm-bratislava-lex-
pepping-...](http://netlipse.eu/media/77918/11nwm-bratislava-lex-pepping-
baggage-handling-at-amsterdam-airport-schiphol-implementing-new-
technologies.pdf)

------
elcapitan
Wow. It's actually a miracle that this works most of the time. That suitcase
is pretty standard, I could imagine a million ways how some backpack or other
unusually formed piece of baggage would jam that thing.

And how on earth do they route individual packages through the system with
that speed? Is there some pattern recognition system that identifies them on
the fly and then routes left, right, left right, etc?

This reminds me of a funny part of a book I read about automation (and its
impact on human labour), which described how modern corn mills identify bad
grain: they shoot every single grain through a high speed tunnel and identify
malformed (bad, moldy) grain with pattern recognition and then filter them
out.

~~~
mike_hearn
They have sets of barcode scanners dotted around routing points. With enough
of them and the big barcodes on the baggage tags, they can scan most
automatically. Any that fail scanning are diverted to a side belt where a
human scans them with a handheld unit.

------
darkvertex
That was incredible. Remove the "flip aside" parts and it's much better than
your average rollercoaster! :D

------
bronz
This is unbelievable. How can they possibly justify the cost of this system?

~~~
mike_hearn
Same as for any automated system: reliability and throughput.

Some of these airports are enormous, Schipol especially so. They're handling
150,000 bags per day at peak times. If you generously assume a 1% error rate
([http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/HumanErr/Basic.htm](http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/HumanErr/Basic.htm))
and that each bag is touched by only one human, then you'd be misrouting or
losing 1500 bags per day, which is huge. But of course bags aren't going to be
handled by just one human, there would be many making complex routing
decisions, over and over again. So the true loss rate would be much worse.

Bear in mind that if the airline doesn't get the bag to the right place then
the bag has to be sent onwards later, and then the airline has to pay for home
delivery of the baggage. So the cost of mistakes adds up fast. Then you have
the sheer amount of manpower needed to move all the bags around by hand. And
not just any manpower, it often has to be _literally_ manpower because you
need strong men to do this as the bags are so heavy, and they can't work long
shifts because they get tired.

It's pretty easy to see how such things can be justified. You wouldn't be able
to scale air travel to the current levels it sees without such systems.

------
rosege
not sure if this is a new system but I flew through Schiphol a lot around
2010-2012 and the baggage was very slow. Typically half an hour wait. Whenever
possible I flew with carry on as I found it frustrating to have an hour flight
then half an hour wait.

