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Condé Nast and Deloitte Digital have teamed up to present Digital Acceleration in the Time of COVID, a nine-part series of stories from global business leaders who've charted a path through uncertainty.
Here, Michael Snell, former Group General Manager of Digital Strategy, Airservices shares how digital twin technology adapted from Formula 1 racing has helped air traffic controllers down under manage increasingly complex scenarios.
Picture a map of the world. Find Australia. Now draw a circle extending westward halfway to Africa, eastward to New Zealand, south to Antarctica, and north to Indonesia. You’ve just delineated 11% of the world’s airspace—airspace managed by Australia’s federal Airservices.
In 2019, Airservices tracked over 4 million aircraft movements within that space, assuring safe transport for more than 156 million passengers. It also provided aviation rescue and fire-fighting services for the Australian continent, nearly three million square miles of territory that have suffered from devastating wildfires in recent years. That’s a big remit. Then came 2020, and the collapse of air traffic generally. Suddenly, things got awfully quiet.
According to the UN World Tourism barometer, the pandemic triggered a 72% drop in international tourists in first three quarters of 2020. The economic impact for Australia was enormous, and Airservices wasn’t spared. But fortunately for Australians, Michael Snell is a glass-half-full kind of guy.
“We could all worry about the personal and professional challenges of today or get to work and make the changes we needed for tomorrow,” says Snell, who was General Manager of Digital Strategy at Airservices at the time. “There was a chance to step up.”
He adds: “COVID accelerated the digital transformation journey we were already on. It’s been a deeply uncertain time, but also an exciting one as we’ve made some important changes.”
Michael Snell
former Group General Manager of Digital Strategy, Airservices
Airservices had already been preparing for what Snell calls “the most disruptive decade in aviation history.” That was before COVID struck. The pandemic and economic downturns may have exposed short-term volatility in aviation, but other technology-and consumer-led changes are expected to have longer-term, fundamental implications for the industry.
Airservices has projected the number of conventional flights in its airspace will double over the next two decades, with yet more traffic from new generations of commercial and recreational drones. Add a growing appetite for on-demand, short-haul air mobility services, and an already complex, networked choreography of small and large aircraft—each of which simply must take off, fly and land safely—becomes daunting.
“This will create a great new strain on the system, and we’re not completely sure how that will play out,” Snell says. “So we must be thinking about how to fine tune all of our services and manage Australian air space more intelligently.”
To that end, Airservices deployed a solution from Deloitte Digital that was built in collaboration with supercar maker McLaren.
What do race cars have to do with airplanes? Both are fast and complicated. Operating either demands an obsession with safety, timing, and the ability to make critical decisions with multiple variables confidently and quickly. For its part, McLaren captures and processes millions of possible scenarios during an F1 race, modeling outcomes of a range of tactical decisions in real time.
Working with the applied technologies wing of the British racing company, Deloitte Digital leveraged McLaren’s experience in advanced engineering, sensor and simulation tools to jointly create aviation solutions with digital twin technology. These offerings create digital versions of complicated real-world environments for risk-free stress testing and scenario planning. IDC projects that by 2022, 40 percent of IoT platform vendors will integrate simulation platforms, systems, and capabilities to create digital twins, with 70 percent of manufacturers using the technology to conduct process simulations and scenario evaluations.
“The digital twin is useful when dealing with complex problems in connected environments,” said Dr Kellie Nuttall, leader of Deloitte’s Artificial Intelligence practice in Australia. “You can tweak and adjust to see how adjustments in one area affect others. It’s an important tool when you’re working collaboratively.”
Airservices seeds its digital twin with historic weather and air traffic data. They can then run different scenarios – thousands per second -- to explore the effects of various changes. Is a storm coming? Is there an unexpected surge in traffic? Finding and using different scenarios for variables at play like this can not only support safety, but also help alleviate flight delays, which are costly and disruptive for airlines, airports, and air traffic management.
In many ways, the quest for safer, more efficient air travel mirrors the challenges brought on by the COVID crisis – a comparison that doesn’t elude Snell. “We live in a complex and connected environment,” he says. “A decision in one area radically changes something in another.”
Ultimately, he concludes, it’s up to all of us, individually and collectively, to ensure that we use the data at hand to make the right choices.
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