How Airlines Can Drive Operational Excellence with TCS Aviana on AWS

By Gudla Sreedhar, Product Head – TCS Aviana
By Sundaresan Varadarajan, Chief Architect – TCS Aviana
By WU KUNPENG Tim, Sr. AI Specialist Solutions Architect – AWS
By Sanjay Gupta, Sr. Solutions Architect – AWS

TCS

Even in today’s era of digitization, the challenges faced in airline operations are complex. They involve a broad set of time-critical processes that span ground and flight operations, above- and below-the-wing tasks, flight and cabin crew operations, and customer experience management.

A unified, autonomous, and fully digital airline operations solution can help mitigate the challenges related to cost inefficiency, latency, or suboptimal decisions and their consequences, including cost, disruption, and customer dissatisfaction.

TCS Aviana is an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)-based solution suite developed by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It enables airlines to have comprehensive operations visibility, digital collaboration, and data-driven decision-making through connected insights and intelligence.

TCS is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with numerous AWS Competencies including Travel and Hospitality, Machine Learning, Internet of Things (IoT), SAP, and Mainframe Migrations.

In this post, we will delineate how the TCS Aviana solution transforms airline operations, dive deep into its architecture and business functions, and review the benefits of the solution.

Solution Architecture

The following architecture diagram displays the unique layers within TCS Aviana that were designed to work together, to enable managers and frontline staff to consume contextual information and insights in real-time across various channels, including mobile, desktop, and wearable technology.

Figure 1 – TCS Aviana solution architecture on AWS.

Following are the solution layers that engage airline staff:

Continuous Real-Time Impact Analyzer

This feature helps connect airline systems in real-time, brings a single view of data, and powers the solution’s Manage-by-Exception capabilities.

The Impact Analyzer is comprised of a digital spine that offers a high-speed messaging and data processing layer designed to simplify systems, integrate data from different sources, and provide users with a unified, connected view, in near real time.

The Manage-by-Exception engine enables fast responses to anomalies that may cause disruption or irregular operations through real-time detection.

The architecture offers:

• Streaming of a large number of enterprise operational events using Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK).
• Distributed computational capabilities using the Amazon EMR big data platform for processing a large amount of enterprise events at scale.
• Multi-dimensional data indexing and querying capabilities of Amazon OpenSearch Service for high-speed data access that enables real-time intelligence.
• High concurrency writes through Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with high availability (HA) to deliver greater performance.

Continuous Dynamic Planning Intelligence

This component enables intelligent automation and decisions through data mining, resolvers, models, and simulator techniques. It acts like an airline operations digital twin to replicate the state of current operations, and optimize decisions to achieve enterprise goals and objectives.

The architecture includes:

• A data science sandbox that uses Amazon SageMaker to build and train intelligent models.
• AI/ML-based algorithms and mathematical models which offer capabilities, such as bottleneck and resource demand predictions, root cause identification, and cost-effective decision simulations, that use Python-based shells deployed on Amazon EMR for processing operational events at scale.

Continuous Decision Orchestration and Collaboration

This module dynamically defines and orchestrates business processes based on operational priorities, including variable operation contexts, managing bottlenecks, and aligning available resources to continuously changing operational goals.

TCS Aviana allows airline managers to pick and choose the appropriate templates based on the real-time situation on the ground, and optimally assign stakeholders for execution.

The architecture offers:

• Auto-scalability of orchestration and business services using AWS Fargate.

Continuous Digital Engagement

With this feature, frontline staff are empowered through integrating information, processes, and intelligence to enable collaboration by means of Integrated Task Card widgets enriched with situational and location-aware contexts.

Collaboration Plug & Play capabilities are enabled through a multi-widget dynamic rendering feature for each persona. This helps minimize the digital overhead across the enterprise, and enables rapid acceleration to business insights.

Modular Solution

TCS Aviana is modularized to enable incremental implementation of the functionality, while allowing airlines to scale operational workloads and leverage AWS capabilities, including flexible, pay-per-use licensing models. Download the solution brochure to learn more.

Figure 2 – TCS Aviana functional view by module.

The solution is comprised of:

• New Core Platform: Enables near real-time, unified, and connected view of operations to augment optimal decisions.
• Connected Journey Suite: Enables proactive customer engagement and manages service disruptions in near real time with two modules: goSmart for frontline staff at airports, and CrewCollab for cabin crew.
• Smart Turn: Provides full visibility into aircraft turnaround, and identifies causality to improve efficiency.
• Smart Maintenance (smartMX): Forecasts maintenance requirements based on operational intelligence to maximize aircraft utilization.
• Resource Uberization: Dynamically allocates resources based on varying operational demands.
• Integrated Operations Control Center (OCC) Discovery and Resolve: Enables manage-by-exception for OCC to act on the highest priorities.

Airline Operational Benefits

• Improved on-time performance: Situational awareness and early visibility helps reduce controllable delays due to boarding and customer handling, resulting in a reduction in turnaround delays.
• Responsive airline operations: Connected operations insights, and early predictions/augmented decisions and capabilities, enable fast responses to anomalies attributed to irregular operations.
• Improved productivity: Real-time visibility of aircraft turnaround and ground, passenger, crew, and engineering operations. Actionable information for frontline staff.
• Faster recovery: Enable operations decisions which enhance the customer experience. Faster recovery based on real-time alerts and operational contexts.
• Sustainability: Empower staff with digital twins, enabling optimized processes and paperless operations, resulting in reduced fuel usage.

United Airlines Transforms its Network Operations with TCS Aviana

United Airlines has over 5,000 daily departures, seven hubs, 300+ airports, and 3,000+ network operations personnel across five continents. In this APN TV video, learn how TCS Aviana enabled the airline to connect siloed systems through building a unified, real-time view of operations using AWS native services.

Conclusion

The airline industry has been at the forefront of digital disruption and has engaged in transforming the passenger experience—from booking to airport, in-flight to post-flight.

Airlines are also focusing on modernizing operations through improved collaboration and interoperability to increase efficiencies, cost savings, and sustainability. As airlines reinvent themselves, TCS is continuously innovating to partner with customers in building what’s next in travel.

The TCS Aviana solution suite accelerates airline and airport operations transformation, and ultimately enhances the customer experience.

To get started, engage TCS to implement TCS Aviana.

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TCS – AWS Partner Spotlight

TCS is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP that has been partnering with many of the world’s largest businesses in their transformation journeys for the last 50 years.

Contact TCS | Partner Overview