How Vancouver International Airport exploits spatial intelligence to help with mowing the grass (and why that’s important!)

Vancouver International Airport says it’s starting to gain significant operational help from a GIS-based digital twin that’s constantly refreshed and updated by a spatial data integration backbone.

According to a GIS (Geographic Information System) specialist working at the Airport, Carlos Silva, the twin is ensuring that teams delivering apps and services always have the most complete and up-to-date physical and location information at their fingertips.

The virtual full-scale data model also takes full advantage of the extensive use of APIs for real-time tracking of maintenance reports, work orders, and passenger movements.

It’s even been the basis for one of the first North American hubs to provide its indoor mapping data to Apple Maps - allowing visitors accurate on-site guidance, while for managers, things like LiDAR data translation are offering overall real-time insights into airport operations.

For Silva:

On a day-to-day basis, for most people the digital twin is finding where a door is or where a room is, they go to the GIS.

That sounds trivial but is actually really handy for somewhere with as many rooms as we have. But beyond that, as it’s real-time, the twin also shows operational staff that this plane's delayed or this one’s coming into this gate, and where the trucks are at - which makes running things so much smoother.

And because we have sensors in all our terminals, thanks to the digital twin, if we see three big planes that came in all at once, we can funnel people to where they’re needed, as well as spot if there’s anything like bad weather damage that needs to be immediately addressed.

Multiple feeds into one master GIS database

Located near downtown Vancouver and managed as a non-profit, Vancouver Airport (YVR) is the second busiest airport in Canada, seeing passenger traffic of over 26 million per year.

Silva and his colleagues call their facility ‘YVR’ because of a Canadian aviation convention combining a ‘Y’ prefix (meaning the airport has a co-located radio/weather station) with the original two-letter radio station code for Vancouver, ‘VR.’ 

In any case, when it comes to management information systems, the airport is a long-time user of a platform called FME - a product of a long-established British Columbia-based data integration provider with particular expertise in ‘spatial’ data, Safe Software.

Safe is not a GIS vendor, but a way for Silva to integrate data from numerous systems into its ESRI ArcSDE GIS, he says.

This involves everything from room data from core CAD files to location info data from IBM Maximo, and lease information from an airport specialist application called Amadeus PROPworks. 

Silva confirms FME standardizes and performs quality assurance and validation checks on these kinds of feeds while updating the core ESRI system, as it has built-in support for 800-plus ‘out-of-the-box’ data transformers, allowing GIS users like YVR to build and automate custom integration workflows without having to code. 

A dead serious major airport use case: grass cutting

YVR needed something like this, he says, as multiple teams, systems, and real-time updates are involved in an airport’s day-to-day operations, while FM (facilities maintenance), asset managers, security, and other teams all have their own datasets. 

Construction, aircraft types (Vancouver is one of the few major international airports to have a terminal for scheduled floatplanes), and passenger volumes are also constantly changing and increasing, he states. 

Keeping all these moving pieces coordinated is key to the safety and operational efficiency of the airport, and all datasets need to have the ability to respond to live events and reflect changes in other datasets.  

In practical terms, that means everything from knowing the actual not estimated number of streetlights to necessary infrastructure updates - and, intriguingly, how complete today’s mowing of the lawns and sidings is going.

Why that matters: because Vancouver lies on a major migratory flyway, due to wildlife risks to aircraft, grass cutting is a critical need.

That’s because grass height must be carefully managed to prevent birds and animals from hiding or feeding in the area, which could pose safety hazards near runways. 

Silva explains:

You want to always be sure that the grass is never so long that the birds can’t hide in it, or the coyotes aren't running around in it trying to chase after them. Plus, if it rains, you want to keep it short so that the birds aren't feeding on the worms and grubs that are coming up from the soil. Here, our water table is fairly low, so there are a bunch of challenges around grass here.

Different mowing equipment is also required depending on proximity to the runway, weather conditions/time of year, and environmental factors such as current or expected soil moisture - and so, a lot of data. 

In the past, YVR’s maintenance crews relied on manual processes - sending teams out, then later documenting the work on paper maps and reports - to keep on top of this core airport function. 

He says:

Since GIS had not historically been particularly useful to these guys, they were using things like SharePoint and mobile devices to streamline reporting. Eventually, supervisors created a digital form that crews completed daily, logging their credentials, the fields serviced, the equipment used, and the duration of the work, but then we thought: can we spatially visualize this information?

That turned out to be extremely useful, as in doing so Silva and his team discovered inconsistencies such as unnamed or misidentified fields, and newly constructed areas that were not yet reflected in GIS. Now, grass cutting is an ongoing, automated process where team leaders can see equipment use, crew assignments, and operational history over customizable timeframes, e.g., two weeks. 

And as data validation also flags entries that do not match existing GIS records, potential bird-aircraft issues always get reviewed and corrected promptly.

Next Steps

For Silva, just because GIS and even digital twin is now to some extent BAU/Business as Usual at YVR doesn’t mean all its potential is tapped out:

A lot of folks here still lack awareness of GIS and how it can be used, so in fact a key part of my role has been to improve education and understanding across the organization. 

Initially, efforts were focused on my department - engineering - and public-facing teams such as terminal staff, and those responsible for public maps and the website. That means that some departments were unintentionally left out due to limited staffing and capacity. 

So, the goal is to re-engage those groups - which definitely means supporting grass cutting and winter operations planning - over the next six months. The good news is I can see opportunities across the Airport where a spatial perspective would be valuable, where we either haven’t reached those teams yet or haven’t worked with them in many years.