The nerve center at MIA is its Airport Operations Center (AOC) which operates around the clock, monitoring activity, responding to safety and security incidents, disseminating information and responding to requests from stakeholders throughout the airport.
An essential daily task for the AOC team is incident logging, with approximately 70 detailed logs being created each day, and that number set to increase as a result of internal process changes within the department.
Rupen Philloura is the director of terminal operations & AOC at Miami International Airport and explained, “The MLS logging system was a 25-year-old custom built application. It was familiar for our operators to use, but it was unwieldy, unreliable and inefficient. With logging being such a critical and growing aspect of our day-today operations, we needed to upgrade to a state-of-the-art unified platform.”
The platform chosen by the airport was the award-winning enterprise incident management system, Coda Orchestrator, from Octave, a company whose solutions are trusted by airports around the world. Miami itself was already working with the company, using its NiceVision video management software (VMS) and analytics solutions across its highly distributed video surveillance system.
It gives us complete situational awareness regarding when and how an event transpired, who responded, how, and the result. This insight improves our decision-making and feeds a continual cycle of improvement.
It gives us complete situational awareness regarding when and how an event transpired, who responded, how, and the result. This insight improves our decision-making and feeds a continual cycle of improvement.
Today, the AOC has six Coda Orchestrator-powered stations from which operators monitor the airport’s Honeywell/EBI fire alarm and Matrix access control systems, as well as its extensive surveillance camera network in real time.
Philloura described the process, saying, “When an alert is raised, the operator must follow a strict set of procedures for that specific event; this might simply be resetting an alarm remotely, or the dispatch of maintenance personnel. Incidents and subsequent actions need to be accurately documented for regulatory compliance purposes, but also to help us to learn and improve how we deal with incidents and events.”
The need to manually enter all details has been replaced by the dynamic form functionality within Coda Orchestrator. It automatically populates and logs specific information relating to an incident, saving operators valuable time, and ensuring every log is of a consistently high standard.
“Together with the input of the operator we are assured that the logs we generate and store are comprehensive end-to-end accounts, that can be quickly and reliably searched, retrieved and reviewed,” added Philloura.