Case Study ...

ICISS

Advantage System Solutions has developed ICISS for use at Airports.  The system is designed to follow the process that allows airline passengers to check-in using the internet at home. Boarding cards, which are printed by the passenger are scanned using ICISS to enable various checks to be performed. This has many benefits for BAA, including: the need for fewer check-in staff; the need for fewer (relatively expensive) magnetic-stripe boarding cards, and offers improvements in security.

The home-printed A4-paper boarding card includes a 2-dimensional barcode, containing approximately 2kB of flight and passenger information in a standard IATA format, which is presented by the passenger and scanned by airport staff.  The system will then perform validation checks such as:

•   is the passenger at the correct airport and on the correct day?
•   is the flight a domestic or international flight?
•   has this boarding card been encountered before?

giving audible and visual signals either allowing the passenger to proceed to security controls (upon successful validation), or else triggering operational procedures to address the validation failure.

The first iteration of the ICISS software was rolled out at Heathrow on 1st July 2005 for selected British Airways (BA) flights. Since go-live the system has been rolled out to most BAA operated airports and is now used to scan the barcodes of an increasing number of airlines.

ICISS comprises a SQL Server 2000 database, a web server running Microsoft IIS 6, and client software on desktop PCs each running Windows XP and having an attached 2-D barcode scanner. 

Following on from the initial rollout further work has been undertaken to integrate the product with the Common User Lounge System (CULS) - developed by Advantage in 2004 and currently in operational use at Gatwick Airport. This development work has also included the addition of functionality to check against passenger “watch lists”, improved reporting and the ability to identify airlines able to use the system at a given terminal.

Updated June 2006