Airport

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 track thousands of baggage carts in real time across terminals, check-in halls, storage areas and passenger zones. Each baggage cart is equipped with a BLE tag, continuously emitting signals captured by the existing BLE-enabled Wi-Fi infrastructure deployed throughout the airport.

Using these signals, Pole Star computes the real-time indoor location of every cart and performs automatic zone-based counting within predefined operational areas. This provides airport teams with continuous visibility on asset availability and distribution, without manual checks.

When abnormal situations occur—such as shortages in high-traffic zones, surpluses in low-demand areas or prolonged inactivity—the system generates intelligent alerts. This allows operators to anticipate issues, rebalance assets proactively and optimize redistribution workflows, transforming baggage cart management from a reactive process into a data-driven operational function.

Agent & baggage tractor tracking

Ground handling operations require close coordination between baggage sorting facilities and aircraft. Pole Star enables real-time tracking of agents and electric baggage tractors using a smartphone-based location approach powered by NAO® Mobile.

Agents and vehicles are geolocated directly via professional mobile devices, ensuring seamless visibility across indoor sorting areas and outdoor airside environments. This real-time location layer supports the assignment, triggering and monitoring of missions, allowing ground operations to be coordinated dynamically as conditions evolve.

By continuously tracking movements, the solution also enables saturation management at baggage sorter infeed points, helping operators detect congestion early and adjust workflows accordingly. All activities are automatically recorded, supporting mission logging, traceability and comprehensive operational reporting.

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.