AIRPORT

Airports — Indoor location for real-time ground operations

Airports are complex, high-traffic environments where ground operations, asset availability and workforce coordination must be managed continuously and with precision. Across terminals, baggage areas and airside zones, operators need real-time visibility to ensure operational efficiency, minimize disruptions and support data-driven decision-making.

Pole Star provides indoor and indoor/outdoor location solutions designed for airport environments, enabling accurate tracking of assets, staff and vehicles while leveraging existing infrastructure. By transforming location data into actionable operational intelligence, Pole Star helps airports optimize ground operations, improve resource utilization and gain a unified view of activities across the entire airport ecosystem.

Baggage cart tracking and agent & baggage tractor tracking

Baggage cart tracking & asset optimization

Pole Star enables airports to implement scalable airport asset tracking by monitoring thousands of baggage carts in real time across terminals, check-in halls, storage areas and passenger circulation zones. The solution leverages Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tags attached to each baggage cart, continuously emitting signals that are captured by the airport’s existing BLE-enabled Wi-Fi infrastructure.

Using these signals, Pole Star calculates the precise indoor location of every cart through advanced positioning algorithms. The system automatically performs zone-based asset counting within predefined operational areas such as check-in counters, arrival halls, security exits and parking interfaces. This provides airport operations teams with continuous, centralized visibility on baggage cart availability, distribution and movement patterns — eliminating the need for manual inventory checks.

By transforming raw BLE signals into actionable operational data, the platform supports real-time fleet monitoring and smart asset management. Airport managers can instantly identify imbalances between high-traffic passenger zones and lower-demand areas, ensuring that carts are always available where and when passengers need them.

When abnormal situations occur, such as cart shortages in peak hours, surpluses in low-demand zones, or prolonged cart inactivity indicating potential misuse or loss, the system generates intelligent, rule-based alerts. This enables operators to anticipate disruptions, rebalance assets proactively and streamline redistribution workflows.

Through data-driven insights and historical movement analysis, airports can further optimize cart allocation strategies, reduce asset loss, improve passenger satisfaction and enhance overall operational efficiency. Baggage cart management evolves from a reactive logistical task into a fully digitalized, performance-driven function within the broader smart airport ecosystem.

Agent & baggage tractor tracking

Ground handling operations require seamless coordination between baggage sorting facilities, aircraft turnaround teams and airside vehicle fleets. To ensure operational efficiency in complex airport environments, Pole Star delivers a smartphone-based Real-Time Location System (RTLS) powered by NAO® Mobile. The solution enables real-time tracking of ground agents, supervisors and electric baggage tractors directly through professional mobile devices. By leveraging existing smartphones, airports and ground handling companies benefit from a scalable and cost-efficient indoor and outdoor positioning infrastructure.

Agents and vehicles are continuously geolocated across baggage sorting areas, terminals, and outdoor airside zones. This unified location layer provides full operational visibility, supporting dynamic mission assignment, task triggering and live monitoring of ground handling activities. As operational conditions evolve — flight delays, peak traffic, equipment shortages — supervisors can instantly reallocate resources and optimize turnaround performance.

Beyond live coordination, the platform enhances airport asset tracking and baggage flow management. Continuous movement tracking enables saturation monitoring at baggage sorter infeed points, helping operators detect congestion risks early and proactively adjust workflows. This contributes to smoother aircraft turnaround, reduced bottlenecks and improved service level compliance.

All missions and movements are automatically recorded, generating detailed operational logs, traceability data and performance analytics. Airports and ground handling providers gain actionable insights to improve resource allocation, reduce idle time, enhance safety and strengthen overall operational efficiency.

Indoor / outdoor operational continuity

Airport operations do not stop at terminal boundaries. Pole Star provides continuous indoor and outdoor location services, ensuring consistent tracking as assets, agents and vehicles move between terminals, baggage areas and airside operational zones.

This unified location layer eliminates operational blind spots and ensures that ground handling workflows remain visible and coordinated across the entire airport environment, rather than being managed in isolated silos.

Real-time supervision & operational analytics

Pole Star transforms raw location data into actionable operational intelligence. Through real-time dashboards and historical analytics, airport teams can monitor asset availability by zone, analyze movement and utilization patterns, track alerts and response times, and support operational planning and continuous optimization.

This analytical layer enables airports to move from reactive supervision to informed, data-driven decision-making, both at operational and strategic levels.

Airport-ready location architecture

Pole Star’s airport solutions rely on a scalable and interoperable architecture, designed to integrate seamlessly with existing airport IT and network infrastructure. Location services combine tag-based asset tracking and smartphone-based workforce tracking within a single platform.

Key components include NAO® Track for real-time asset location, NAO® Mobile SDK for staff and vehicle tracking, and NAO® Viewer for supervision, alerts and analytics. The solution leverages BLE-enabled Wi-Fi infrastructure and beacons, and supports cloud, on-premise or hybrid deployments, ensuring reliability, low latency and operational flexibility.

Designed for large-scale airport operations

Pole Star’s solutions are designed to operate at very large scale, supporting thousands of assets across multiple terminals and complex indoor and airside environments. By leveraging existing infrastructure and modular deployment models, airports can deploy location services efficiently without heavy infrastructure changes.

Turning location data into operational value

By delivering accurate, real-time visibility on assets, staff and ground operations, Pole Star helps airports improve operational efficiency, reduce delays and bottlenecks, optimize resource utilization and gain full visibility across terminals and airside environments.