CASE STUDY
With its forecasting model in Databricks , the airport can plan predictive maintenance , cleaning and service interruptions during downtime to reduce costs and better avoid impacts on travellers . As a result , their teams are better prepared for peak travel periods so they can also proactively manage efficient passenger flow .
“ Databricks enables us to provide a more efficient and accurate forecast than we ’ ve ever been able to before . Now , passengers and stakeholders get a greater
MAXIMISING THE VALUE OF OUR DATA WHILST MAINTAINING SECURITY HAS ALWAYS BEEN A PRIORITY .
dashboards and visualisations with the most upto-date data for business reporting to improve decision making .
• Certification capabilities : To efficiently scale internal adoption and use , Heathrow ’ s users are capitalising on the self-paced training and certification available through Databricks Academy .
• Model tracking and data sharing : Heathrow is also leveraging MLflow to track and promote its ML models from development to production . The team is also looking at Databricks Delta Sharing for data sharing with airlines , ground handlers and other Heathrow companies , and is in the early stages of establishing a centre of excellence to support its ongoing data and AI strategy .
“ Data-driven , accurate forecasting is a nonnegotiable in the travel and hospitality industry – with thousands of daily flights totally dependent on this being done right ,” said Michael Green , VP , Head of Northern Europe at Databricks . “ With the Data Intelligence Platform , Heathrow is able to understand future passenger volumes and plan accordingly , resulting in better service for passengers and a much more efficient operation .” level of service in a much more efficient airport ,” said Andrew Isenman , Head of Technology , Cloud and Data at Heathrow .
Streamlining data processing for accurate forecasting
With the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform , Heathrow was able to simplify its data architecture , improve security , and more efficiently conduct analytics and AI , which allowed its data teams to focus on opportunities to innovate on its business and customer experience . Other key success areas include :
• Data governance : The airport is implementing data governance with Databricks Unity Catalog to secure its data and AI assets under a single permission model , thereby furthering safe and consistent data use across the airport .
• Compute power : With improved , remote computations , the airport can now scale quickly – allowing high-level forecasts to be distributed downstream in easy-to-digest , self-serve analytics . This new capability also drastically speeds up time to insights .
• Cross-team collaboration : Shareable code and insights via team-based notebooks fosters cross-team collaboration . Furthermore , Heathrow integrated Power BI with Databricks to power
We asked Andrew Isenman , Head of Technology , Cloud and Data at Heathrow , further questions to find out more .
What were the key factors that led Heathrow to choose the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to unify and govern your data and AI initiatives ?
Heathrow is the largest airport in Europe ; we welcome over 82 million passengers and handle over 460,000 flights annually . Naturally , our operations generate a high volume of data , and we rely on over 26TB of it – including passenger numbers , flights , airlines , seasonal performance , traffic and weather patterns – to make critical real-time decisions .
Maximising the value of our data is critical to our continued success , and we wanted to build upon our forecasting capabilities by refining our approach to data and AI . As such , we decided to partner with Databricks .
Could you elaborate on the specific challenges you faced prior to using Databricks and how the platform addressed them ?
We initially had a suite of legacy data tools in place , which scattered and siloed our data . This approach was slowing processes and productivity , increasing costs and compromising on accuracy . Without distributed computational power and a high-
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