Maintenance efficiency will have a huge impact on BHS operations and costs, so it's vital the airport has a clear understanding of all requirements over the life-cycle of the system – especially when comparing the performance and TCO of a conventional conveyor compared to an ICS.
Spare parts are a key consideration for any airport investing in a new Baggage Handling System (BHS).
As this article will demonstrate, it is important for an airport to have a clear understanding of all spare part requirements over the life-cycle of the system – especially when comparing a conventional conveyor to an ICS.
Spare part efficiency will have a huge impact on both operations and costs, so it is vital that airports fully appreciate the benefits and drawbacks of both types of system, throughout the life-cycle, before making an investment.
Compared to a conventional conveyor, an ICS is much easier to maintain and repair.
Firstly, there is not as much work – and it is very rarely critical work thanks to predictive maintenance.
Secondly, the work is easier to carry out: the spare parts are more accessible and easy to handle, and the modular design of the ICS enables easy access from either side.
Airports switching from a conventional conveyor-based BHS system to an ICS can make vast resource savings.
For example, some conventional conveyor systems will use many types of gearboxes and they, along with all the system’s bearings, will need regular oiling.
An ICS does not use gearboxes and its bearings are all sealed – a huge reduction in maintenance work.
Using predictive maintenance, it’s extremely rare that a technician might have to carry out a repair on an ICS to get the system running again. More likely, ICS maintenance and repairs are scheduled during planned downtime.
Instead of servicing the hardware, O & M specialists will spend most of their time preoccupied with collecting and analysing data.
The data enables predictive maintenance, so maintenance can be condition-based. This means that technicians need not be on call all the time.
Typically for a conventional conveyor, maintenance is calendar-based or when breakdowns occur, so the technicians need to be on call 24-7.
The clever design of both a tote-based and cart-based ICS will always enable fast maintenance, even if there is rarely any extreme pressure to carry out the work quickly.
A tote-based ICS has considerably fewer spare parts than a conventional conveyor – roughly speaking, 100 vs 1,000 – of which all are easy for just one technician to handle.
Some of the conventional conveyor belts are understandably very heavy (a 100×2,500 cm belt would weigh 150 kilos vs barely 10 kilos for a tote-based ICS) and they accordingly need heavier pulleys (100 vs 10-15 kilos for a tote-based ICS) and motors (50-80 vs 11-12 kilos) to power them, plus a minimum of two technicians to handle and service them.
The range of all of these items is vast, whereas for a tote-based ICS, there are only a handful of different pulleys and motors. A large number of items – for example, timing belts and drums – are uniform.
A cart-based ICS has even fewer spare parts. The carts run on a rail system that is virtually maintenance-free and there are no moving parts.
Meanwhile, a central service station enables easy cart maintenance while the system remains in operation – the control system will automatically flag when a cart is in need of service and reroute it to the maintenance station, leaving the system to carry on with baggage handling. Once the cart has been serviced, it can resume operations.
With the conventional conveyor’s need for a huge inventory comes the need for a huge storage facility, and while this isn’t often a problem for major airports, it’s unlikely they will have more than one fully-stocked facility.
With a tote-based ICS, because the inventory is so much smaller, it’s possible to maintain three or four much smaller facilities (roughly a tenth of the size), all fully stocked with replacement parts and strategically located to cover the full extent of the system.
Overall, the ICS enables a much faster reaction time – also aided by the time saved identifying which part (one of 100 vs 1,000) is needed – and much shorter breakdown periods.
The cost of ensuring 1,000 spare parts are operational at one facility will be significantly higher than maintaining 300 to 400 parts facilities. With a large inventory, more parts will succumb to the conditions – rust etc.
The choice of BHS will be a major influence on maintenance: the more efficient the system, and easier it is for operators to diagnose problems, the better.
There’s an unwritten rule that a part has a life-cycle of 10,000 hours of use, but airports need not follow this rigidly, as this can result in over-maintenance, which is costly.
Instead, airports with ICSs can write their own rule: trust the data more than anything the industry might presume.
There are documented cases of components lasting far longer than their projected life-cycles – often the result of favourable conditions and the right amount of maintenance.
Ultimately, an airport with ICS can find a sweet spot between over-maintenance and under-maintenance: reduced spare part and labour costs, no breakdowns.
A system that enables predictive maintenance will typically use a traffic light warning system to warn operators of potential problems with parts that are not behaving typically and liable to fail.
While conventional conveyors do not have the capacity for gathering data and using predictive maintenance, the ICS is set up for this purpose.
Equally important is choosing a system that comes with specialised maintenance – preferably from the system provider.
Instead of buying a new system and taking all maintenance in-house, it always makes good sense to include a service contract.
A trusted, experienced system supplier can first help the airport establish its needs before recommending the best system for their needs.
The system supplier can then help with installation, both hardware and software, and optimising performance – potentially with the help of a digital twin, which integrates well with an ICS.
This will include data analysis – to understand the tendencies of certain parts to perform like they do – and the application of machine learning. Experienced experts can train staff to better interpret the data.
And finally, the system provider can continue to supply the BHS operator with spare parts, even if the parts are no longer available – for example, electronic parts can become obsolete after just five or ten years – by producing replacement parts.
This is a crucial point, as potentially a supplier can sell a system and then go out of business, leaving the BHS operator with nowhere to find necessary spare parts.
The most obvious other benefits of thinking spare parts into the choice of BHS are cost and customisation.
With an ICS, an airport can reasonably expect to halve its annual expenditure on staff and spare parts like in the example below, a comparison of a conventional conveyor and ICS of similar size:
In summary, airports can expect to cut their operational costs by switching from a conventional conveyor to an ICS thanks to the following benefits:
Integral to the ICS tech working is harvesting its data and using it to make informed decisions about the recommended number of spare parts, how spare parts will perform, and how much maintenance is required to enable them to perform optimally without ever lowering efficiency levels. Reducing their maintenance requirements and spare part inventory levels will enable airports with an ICS to substantially cut labour and other O&M costs.
