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Denver Airport Automated Baggage System Abandoned
cherylchase writes "Denver International Airport opened in 1995 with an ambitious fully automated baggage system: 26 miles of underground track, thousands of small gray carts, all controlled by a mainframe programmed for just in time delivery. But the system never worked well; bugs delayed the airport's opening for months (at $1M/day). The system has now been abandoned as a cost cutting measure." From the article: "Technology, too, has brought change. Back then, the big-brained mainframe doing it all from command central was the model of high tech. Today the very idea of it sounds like a cold-war-era relic, engineers say. Decentralization and mobile computing technology have taken over just about everything, allowing airlines, warehouse operators and shippers like FedEx to learn with just a few clicks the whereabouts of an item in motion, a feature that was supposed to be a chief strength of the baggage system."
sound very high-tech to me.
I've been in airports all over the place, I would think 26 miles of track underground wouldn't speed up the process, especially if it is unmanned. I trust eyes on my luggage more than nobody knowing if it is really being moved or not. I've had luggage take forever in JFK airport, and the fastest was in another country!
Look, you have to store the data somewhere. Just because your FedEx guy clicks his little wireless dealie when you sign for a package, doesn't mean that his little wireless dealie is the datastore for all info about the package.
Why is the 'big central mainframe' the cause of the problems here?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Go ahead and Google Denver International Airport and look into some of the conspiracy-theories surrounding the building, murals, underground facilities, etc. It's pretty wierd stuff, interesting to say in the least.
Whether or not it's true, I don't know. You decide.
I can see it now. A bunch of guys staring at their PDAs wondering why the luggage sitting in front of them isn't going anywhere. On a side note, anyone else ever want to ride those tracks a la Toy Story 2?
suck my ping!
When's the opening of the electronica club that is replacing it?
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
This was on the world news (well nightly network news) almost 3 weeks ago, bleck.
Also, they mentioned that this system was the first one run by PCs! Wikipedia has had this up for quite some time as well.
Reading up on it, it appears more that the lack of PLANNING was more at fault. The system was designed AND implemented with only 2 years left before opening, and with the majority of construction on the airport already completed, meaning the physical aspects of it had to be squeezed in where ever spae was available, given that, the results are not to surprising.
If anything this represents a massive failure on the part of management to allocate enough time for a project, implementations of far smaller systems than the one at Denver spent two years alone in just the research phase!
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I was thinking that with the advances made to connection speeds and technologies like the internet, mainframe models where a cluster of computers would control and store everything were the way to go and thin clients would then require less support - What is wrong with this?
Just as the implementation of IBM's OS/360 forms part of the "history" section of many Computer Science texts, so the Denver Airport baggage system is fast becoming history. The big difference of course being, OS/360 was a spectacular success, wheras Denver was a catastrophic failure.
Writing this stuff up is fine and good, but I think it would be worthwhile to try to learn from it. What was done differently?
If folklore serves me correctly, IBM was not afraid to throw money at the problem. I seem to remember they put two separate teams on the problem and took the best from each, fully conscious that half the effort would be thrown away. They sank as much money on it as was required, and ultimately succeeded.
Denver probably ate many more Dollars than OS/360, though I wouldn't know. But:
Apparently, this last has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I work in software development for an airline. It's amazing how much of a megaproject a reservation system is proving to be these days, and how many past attempts have failed. That's why one of the world's major reservation systems still runs in assembler on an IBM mainframe.
I think we're talking over-engineering, Big Design Up Front, profiteering, and (attempted, far too late) price-gouging.
Either that, or the only way to make a very large project successful is to code it in Assembler on an IBM mainframe.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
It's bad when your luggage is stuck in an infinite loop and the airport can't claim that the luggage was lost when it whizes by.
Not mentioned much these days was that the huge delays in getting the Denver Airport baggage handling system was a huge black eye to IBM who had been bragging loudly about how their OS/2 operating system was running it.
"Automation always looks good on paper," said Veronica Stevenson, a lead baggage handler for United Airlines and president of the union local that represents United's 1,300 or so baggage handlers in Denver. "Sometimes you need real people."
A system that would have streamlined and reduced the need for union employees has been found to not be very good by those union employees? Shock and awe, gentlemen. Shock and awe.
Robots do exactly what you tell them to. It only damaged luggage if the luggage wasn't loaded onto the robot correctly, it only misplaced luggage if the robot was told to go to the wrong place.
Can you blame me for wondering if the failure of this system was not entirely because of technical reasons?
Does anyone know how their computerised baggage handling rate ? I never heard that kind of horror story and as far as I know they have a fully computerised system, Doesn't they ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Given the strength of baggage and package handling unions, this comes as no surprise. The idea of a nearly-fully-automated system that could eliminate many human jobs in the name of efficency must have really stirred them into action.
Systems like these work for Fedex and UPS, so why couldn't it work for bags?
I'm Trappped at Berkeley.
Living in Denver and flying in and out of DIA, I can say it's better that any of the other Big City airports I've used. (Dulles, Seatac, Atlanta, DFW, Las Vegas, etc.)
It was accomplished on a scale and timeframe that was hard to imagine before the project. As a Student in Civil Engineering, I got a behind the scenes tour in college.
As the automated baggage system a f*ckup? Oh yeah, most certainly. Did they recover well? I'd say so.
Course, DIA is a political animal, and in all things politics, you're guaranteed to piss off more than half your constituents. But it's a damn sight better than Stapleton was.
Funny thing is, I saw a newspaper article about Denver's new airport, how it was in the middle of nowhere, and had cost overruns, and how it was nothing but a boondoggle.
It was written about Stapleton in the lates 1930's. The switchover in 1985 meant that Stapleton was useful for more than _50_ years. I suspect in another 40 years, DIA won't be in the middle of nowhere anymore.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
"Technology, too, has brought change. Back then, the big-brained mainframe doing it all from command central was the model of high tech. Today the very idea of it sounds like a cold-war-era relic, engineers say. Decentralization and mobile computing technology have taken over just about everything, allowing airlines, warehouse operators and shippers like FedEx to learn with just a few clicks the whereabouts of an item in motion, a feature that was supposed to be a chief strength of the baggage system."
And the same thing is happening with PCs vs mobile 'phone' computers and specialised devices. Microsoft understands this and is going to dominate.
From reading the article, it sounds like the problems had almost nothing to do with the software aspect of the system, whether on a mainframe or not, and everything to do with the physical design of the tracks.
The fact that bags fell off the tracks because the corners weren't banked has nothing to do with the control system. Same for using unstable pallets to hold the bags.
This whole article seems to be based on a flagrant redefinition of the term "bug" as we understand it. It wasn't software bugs that caused the problems, it was crap engineering.
Which begs the question why, when other airports (such as Heathrow) have miles of tracks that work just fine, couldn't Denver do the same?
They tried going to the moon first without first getting a capsule in orbit. Classic example of a too large a leap without the necessary prototyping with too much up front design. An old saying sums it up "If you want to grind a mirror to build a 6 inch telescope it is faster to first build a 4 inch."
The chimp? Asking for someone to save you and calling them "a chimp" at the same time is hardly wise you know.
You're exactly right. I really wish the NYT reporter would have done a better job figuring out why the baggage system didn't work. Instead we're left guessing, with vague anecdotes about carts tipping over and barcodes not being properly scanned -- all of which has nothing whatsoever with the computer in the back office. By the way, mainframes are at the heart of every major package shipper's operations, tracking every little bit of package-related data. Not so surprising: it's a job that must run reliably, without downtime. Mainframes do that well. And if the mainframe was to blame, why didn't United (or the airport or whomever) just drop in one of those wonderful Peecees to do the job? That would have fixed everything, right? Obviously no, that wasn't the problem.
In 30 years what are the people of Denver going to have to show for this vast investment? When jet fuel is $5 per gallon, and United is a long-forgotten corporate failure, and all the 757s in the world are decaying under the Mojave sun, what good will that airport be? While the remaining wealthy are shuttled around in their private aircraft, Denver citizens are going to think that the airport seems like a rather long trip on a bicycle. They'll probably be wondering if that permanenty-ruined 34000 acres might have made nice farmland, and how many mainline railroads they could have had for the same price.
Now they employ thousands of little grey bug eyed people to push the little grey carts around the 26 miles of dark underground tracks...
Oh well, what the hell...
Mars rover for one.
I think you are only seeing the negative and assuming that is all that is out there. The problem with constant media is that we really do lose our sense of proportion. Yeah, one airport luggage system failed because of bad planning. You don't think anything like this ever happens in Europe? Or that there aren't success stories in the US? Think again.
You mention outsourcing that is another story that has been blown out of proportion by the media, including the self-promiting asshats..I mean "researchers" at Gartner. Yeah, some jobs have gone over to India, and they may not be coming back, but it's not nearly as big of thing as NeoIt, Gartner, or the Washington Tech Alliance(is that their name? Can't remember, the group in Washington State who is organizing against outsourcing) would have you believe.
The media only reports on what is new and interesting. Remember the huge SARS scare? Worldwide that killed about 800 people. That is about the number of people who die on America's highways PER WEEK, and yet whenever the Transportation Safety Board issues it's report on how 40,000 people died last year in car accidents, the media gives it a blurb and then turns it's attention to whatever the scare tactics of today are.
The US economy isn't nearly as bad as the naysayers claim it is, nor is it nearly as strong as the Bush apologists boast. The hardest thing to find in this sea of information is the truth.
Monstar L
We all know how damn long the JIT compiler takes to load!
I remember talking about this a lot in an ethics course as part of my CS degree. Some of the comedy that ensued I didn't see mentioned in the article (like baggage transport trucks ramming head on into one another). It seemed (and seems) like a great idea that had no business being attempted by the government.
the article does not draw any correlation between mainframe programming, software, or the failures of the system. a major flaw, according to the article was that: "The whirring baggage carts, programmed to pick up and drop off bags in a perfectly coordinated ballet, often just tipped over and dumped their loads." it also speaks vaguely about some "lizard tongue conveyor" whose failures would hardly seems the domain of software development. the denver baggage system fiasco sounds more like a failure in regular engineering, or at best, robotics programming. i hardly see why mainframe architecture, or any piece of software code, should be blamed as the primary culprit.
From a RTFA between the lines it would appear that they started on this project late, hadn't factored in where they were going to put the necessary IT equipment, almost as if it were an after thought. Essentially their customers baggage was well well down the list of priorities.
And then they blame it on the computers.
Typical.
Some companies/public services really do give the distinct impression that they consider their customers/clients a major inconvenience as they attempt to make a profit/index linked pension.
threadeds blog
I'm an automation systems engineer. I always find the failure of systems such as this very interesting. I've done firefighting operations on many jobs where they were on their way down the toilet. Most of the time failures are caused by only one weak area in a project.. usually it's mechanical design problems, or software (logic) problems. I have seen an instance once where it was a union sabotage problem. It was interesting how that particular line would run perfectly well on it's own during the weekends; but during the week it was a disaster. Since I spend most of my time writing automation logic and robot programs, I tend to get stuck with developing software workarounds for bad mechanical designs. The worst that I recall was a tread booker for a tire plant. It was one of the most crude machines I've ever worked on. My favourite part was a coupling that tended to slip; I was asked to put code in that 're-homed' the servo axis every few minutes automatically. I was paid by the hour; I'll software patch the hell out of bad mechanics if you want! I'm not sure what the problem(s) "really" were in this instance, but it's kind of sad; what airport will be brave enough to try it again?
The BAE design includes a number of high-tech components. It calls for 300 486-class computers distributed in eight control rooms, a Raima Corp. database running on a Netframe Systems fault-tolerant NF250 server, a high-speed fiber-optic ethernet network, 14 million feet of wiring, 56 laser arrays, 400 frequency readers, 22 miles of track, 6 miles of conveyor belts, 3,100 standard telecars, 450 oversized telecars, 10,000 motors, and 92 PLCs to control motors and track switches.
Let's make some educated guesses here. How many PCs? 300? Good grief! Later in the article it says the PCs were running OS/2. So what? This is just bad architecture, regardless of OS. So many parts, so many points of potential failure. And the NetFrame Systems "fault tolerant" server is simply...a glorified PC. (It's X86, ~300 MHz P2, and likely running Windows NT, according to other sources.) This article has more on the sad fate of NetFrame.
There's nothing even close to a mainframe computer in this baggage handling system. The New York Times sucks again!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
They should have built the airport in downtown Denver.
there is a section on this fiasco In "waltzing with bears' a book on software risk management by demarco and lister.
they point out that although the software is blamed for the 1.1m / day cost of lateness, the reality is that many other contractors unrelated to the baggage handling system hid their own lateness behind the very public software problems. Even if the baggage system was on time the airport likely wouldn't have opened when it was supposed to.
The book is pretty interesting and uses the Denver thing to show how a lack of risk management played a big part in the software woes.
Other than the opening days a decade ago, the system has one of the best records of any US airport. The problem is that when trying to decide where to send it to, it would send it down the wrong ramp. basically, the system could not detect the bags correctly. Sadly, with RID coming online with baggage, the system would have been made reliable. Since this system will NOT be ripped out, it may still be brought back in the future.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I was living in the area when DIA was being built (and life sucked badly after it was complete - pretty much everyone I talked to preferred Stapleton for many reasons, the simplest of which was that you didn't have to drive 5 miles at 25mph after getting your short-term parking ticket that charges by the tenth of an hour).
Anyhow, I remember they held a press conference when they finally started the baggage system, and it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life. Suitcases were flying every which way, often ripped in half, and the reporters were all hitting the deck! Of course, this was funny to me because I wasn't down there dodging flying Samsonites; one of the problems with the baggage system was the startlingly high rate of Workers Compensation claims of the workers who had to deal with it, and the most-common cause of injury was, unsurprisingly, falling items.
If anyone has a link to that video, I'd love to see it again. I've tried, but no luck. Maybe some enterprising soul in one of the Denver local news channels can put it up on their website as part of the story of the system's closure?
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
I personally know the conveyor mfg'r in NZ. His co is the only serpintine conveyor patent holder worldwide. If your bags go around, that's his system. Early-on he could not get US engineers to respect design limits of his product's radii limitations.
It wasn't just a botched set of expectations. Blatently they designed away in full-face of specifications to the contrary that components had working limitations. The attitude was fix-it, rather than design to product spec.
That mainframe could be put to good use now. For example, Microsoft could use it to process users' complains about XP's vulnerabilities to virii.
Oh now, wait... the mainframe would be underpowered fot that use too....
it was a bunch of far right-wingers who were very opposed to DIA. They will come up with anything.
Hardware Lies.
Which means, those laser scanners don't always read the label as they should, boxes and things get caught on edges and don't move even when the conveyor is on, electro-mechanical equipment doesn't always work, switches sometimes stick, etc, etc. Your job as a software engineer is to anticipate these and to try to make sense out of the information the hardware's giving it, even though something may be garbled, and write your program so that the system can keep running and that operators are made aware of the mechanical problems the software is seeing so they can correct the situation.
The history/internation history channel showed a program about the Denver Baggage system - I think under it's "Modern Marvels" series - not sure.
Anyway, they did address the problems plagueing the system but made it sound like a thing of the past - that the entire system was deployed too early because of pressure to have it operational on the opening day of the airport.
The major problems were that baggage would get stuck or lost.
Lost - mainly due to the tags not being read by the single UPC like laser. The problem was there was only one laser (think of a self checkout line where you'd have to pass a box over it but now at 10 mph and at a 100% hit rate). They fixed this by having like lasers at each spot and having multiple spots.
Stuck - Improved track design. Oversize baggage were handled purely by humans - no more attempts to shove it through the machine.
These two fixes were supposed to dramatically improve the design but I suppose it was either too late or just that the whole thing didn't save enough money. Afterall, they added the redundancy (room) where if the thing couldn't operate one day with golf carts, etcetera - so if you have to hire all those people on back-up - what's the use?
A few years ago, K-Mart introduced automated checkouts (with all the buzz words of "convenience", "automatic", "quick"). It caused a lot of problems. The solution: K-Mart started putting notices that said, "To improve customer service, we are opeing more checkout lanes with a cashier" (the same ones that they closed earlier). In MBA speak, they have made two "improvements" in a space of a year!
S
I have poured hot grits down my pants. Thank you.
For more background see Software Runaways: Monumental Software Disasters, ISBN: 013673443X, 1997 by Robert P. Glass includes the history of the Denver airport baggage handling system and 15 other desasters in large software systems, e.g. the FAA Air Traffic Control system (death by committee), American Airlines reservation system and others.
Be aware that this is not a technical book and mostly concerned about project management and the problems of defining the requirements of large projects years ahead of their finalization. All the project failures described are very large, complex projects including lots and lots of politics.
As a whole the book is rather depressing, because although in review the cause of failure seems rather obvious, but there is no obvious way to avoid them. It's also a rather dry subject, do not expect to many laughs. But it is great for a large picture on software development, a kind of "how not to do it" guide.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
I'm posting anonymously, because I was a maintaince guy on the baggage system until a couple weeks ago when I decided I'd better look for somewhere else to be because it became painfully clear that my job was going away. I've been there for ten years, and I'll admit that the machine has had some problems... But it very rarely goes down to the point to dosen't work.
The fact is, it's *the biggest machine in the world*, bar none. There's almost 30 miles of completely automated track, more motors and linear accelerators than you can shake a stick at. A machine that big is going to require lots of time to shake out, and that happened about 5 years ago.. It's been running very smothly since then, because we've established protocols to cataloge and rank priority of repairs. You can't imagine the dynamic loads on it. 1/4 inch thick track pieces can snap in two if they weren't repaired correctly, and yeah, 5 years ago we were having problems. It's all but solved today, it's very smoth running and despite it's costs, it's STILL the cheapest way to move bags around in the world.
Those baggage handlers are full of shit, it should be known. One of the main reasons it eats baggage is because those asshats load the baggage like morons. I've seen more panties strewn about than you'd like to know, and it's almost always a women's bag that gets ate. You know why? They pack the fuckers like sausages, and the baggage handlers just plain don't load them correctly. They won't put them flat, one end will be hanging out--and it's always the heavy end. The machine has close tolerances in some places where tracks intersect go over-under, and tight turns that can fling the bags out if they're loaded poorly, I mean they're going 30mph at some points, an improperly loaded bag will get tossed, regardless of it's weight or size.
It is a mechanical monster, no doubt, any machine that big is bound to be... But it baffles me why they've got to shut it down at the peak of it's opperating efficeincy. It's never run so good, and they decide to kill it after we tamed the beast. You should realize that the command and control system they have in place that operates the machine is always being optomized, and sometimes poor programming has led to breakdowns and increased baggage eating.
Conveyors will be much less efficient, and the airport dosen't have the infrastructure in place to handle the entire load of bags by hand, and even if they did it will be far more expensive. There are 4 turnstyles that will need to be built soon--and airport construction is anything but fast.. Like I said, it dosen't make anything but political sense to shut the machine down.
Lets blame the mainframe and concept. Lets not blame the out of business comany that sold an underdeveloped untested product that didn't work. Yeah, that's the cause the err.... mainframe.
I've had luggage take forever in JFK airport, and the fastest was in another country!
This may come as a surprise to you, but some of us out here in the rest of the world don't consider US technology to represent the absolute pinnacle of human achievement.
That's not to say that you don't lead in some areas, just not all of them. Judging by the horror stories one hears about US airports, I'm lead to think that aerial transportation is in the latter category.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
Sure, deep blue and other contendant for the 1000000 googlyflop use mainframe for computer power. but most of the world do not use mainframe for that, but for transaction based system which handle a LOT of transaction per second with real time big database (for example airline RES system, bank system...) and security (transaction termin properly and start properly, and save data properly on disk). Processing power is your LEAST problem. Plus those mainframe system are so old they have been debugged by 2-3 generations of programmer 10 times over. Due to the size of the code and the constant debugging I doubt you can get this kind of quality on PC with a new software and a lot of investement...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Make that "I'm led to think".
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
... mental note
be
more
careful
of
the
word
PROTOTYPE
I believe this system was the subject of a Modern Marvels episode on the Discovery Channel. They talked about early issues but that they had been worked out and the system ran very well. Just when you could believe everything on television! Of course, I'm in effect believing what I'm reading on Slashdot if I think it never worked. Of course I could RTFA and then believe that and....my head hurts!
There were a whole host of problems, including late starts, moving specs, a plan for a small system that was changed to make a plan for a large system by simply multiplying the spec for the small system, construction interferance, etc.
Software Runaways has lots of information about this projects problems. And lots of good info about other runaway projects such as the new ATC system that hasn't gotten off the ground yet.
I took a picture of my punk rock cousin standing next to a mural of a soldier in a gas mask stabbing a white dove in the ass with what looks like a scimitar. Freakin weird. Who on earth would paint such a thing in the airport??
You're an asshole!
Why, thank you! Though I prefer the spelling arsehole.
However, I think it's a little uncalled-for: I was just correcting my own spelling. I realise that using correct spelling on Slashdot is something of a minority interest, but still...
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
Indeed, think of all the farm laborers John Deere has put out of their jobs. We should immediately ban tractors and combines and put everyone back to work in the fields.
As a Coloradoan who has watched, DIA open and get going, the thing that struck me most of all was the planners expected everything to work perfectly. There was no backup plan for when baggage system failed, so people were scrambling to create one so DIA could open. The first time the train failed (which is rarely), there was a mad scramble to get some buses so that people could catch their planes. The first monster snow storm showed that that the airport could remain open, but the road to the airport closed. I see a failure of planning at DIA.
wonder what they're going to do with 26 miles of underground space? might be some fun urban spelunking in say 10 or 20 years!
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
Ok, not always practical. But honestly, whenever I can I fly Horizon Air because they have a little cart outside the airplane when you board that you put your bags on, and the same cart is outside the airplane when you get off (biggest delay I've ever seen was about 10 minutes).
You don't have to wrestle with stowing carry-ons yourself and you don't have to wait around the baggage claim for half an hour or more feeling like a rat waiting for a food pellet.
as I recall Hamburg has an automated port system that handles containers in an entirely automated fashion. loading, offloading, storage etc
after that it is just a matter of scale
perhaps they should have talked to the Hambug folks, who seemed to have got it right.
Anyway, I'm surprised no one's talked about comaring this system to any Wal-Mart distribution center. which carries more stuff over more miles--technology has come a long way.
Technology is often cited as eliminating middle jobs and adding high and low end functions. By eliminating the need for engineers to design baggage robots, portable devices have made low end baggage haulers more valuable and high end airport managers more valuable.
The same can be said of the lowly automobile. Just when you think airplanes are a better deal, new innovations like GPS and wireless internet make the car more valuable and service plans more valuable.
According to the Fine Article:
BAE Automated Systems of Carrollton, Tex., which designed the system, has since been liquidated, and no one associated with the effort could be reached for comment.
I think you're confusing it with BAe, formerly British Aerospace.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
Personally, I blame the inability of people tho think critically on the United States' socialist education system.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
I'll grant you it's big -- but automotive assembly lines (which could be considered "machines") are larger, and CERN is certainly larger.
This might be slightly off topic, but what the hey...
The fortunes of aviation are tied almost directly to the cost to make a plane fly; virtually every airplane in the sky gets the energy required to fly from kerosine, a derivative of oil. As oil gets more expensive, so will flying planes; this is rather in contrast to the usual business cycle of lower costs as time goes by and experience is gained and economies of scale work their way in.
This is why aviation and the systems associated with it are dying. The automated baggage system at DIA is but one example; the antiquated (but quite failure-tolerant) ATC system, the fact that supersonic transport is looking further and further away every day, the death of safe retirement plans in aviation, etc.
Normally, as an industry matures, even if its revenues do not go up, its direct costs go down, leaving extra money for future research, expansion, redundancy, employee wages, etc. In aviation it's going the other way, and there is a good chance in the next 20 years will see it end as a form of mass transit and return to a rare form of transit for rich civilians and military necessity.
Kinda sad. Perhaps DIA can be made into a giant museum to remind people of the aviation world at its peak, when it was cheaper to fly than to drive, briefly.
I have some relatives who have lived in colorado for since well before the airport was built and opened. From what i've heard it's been a shady deal from the start. If you've ever been to the airport, you'll notice that it's miles from anything. It's just sort of sitting out in the middle of undeveloped land. From what i've heard, some politician's wife bought up a bunch of property for dirt cheap out the middle of no-man's land (well away from Denver). When someone proposed a new airport, guess what... it got built in the middle of no-man's land, which it bought at a premium price.
Now, i'm not saying that this has something to do with an automative system failing, but i do think it indicates the culture of hubris surrounding the development of said airport. When someone gets away with whatever they want for long enough, they start to think they can do no wrong. Perhaps that's why it's taken them over ten years (and way too much money) to admit that, "hmmm... i guess it doesn't work." (It probably didn't help too much that it was built during the tech bubble when any less-then-phenominal system could be made perfect by any old computer programmer armed with the almighty dollar.)
This "system" is a solution that has been hunting a problem since the late '60's. A start-up just knew that linear accelerators had to be the answer to some transportation problem, and the ivory-tower consultancies like Batelle just loved it. After haunting airport technical committees for 10 years, Eastern finally bought it for the then-in-design Atlanta terminal. At start-up in 1980, it lasted about 48 hours, than took six weeks to tear out and replace with a conventional system. Then along came Denver, and as someone said here, they were so isolated and over-consulted that they bought it in the face of Eastern's experience. The machine is far too complex and close-tolaranced for a semiskilled yet time-crucial environment like baggage handling. Eastern blew $20 Million, Denver/United $600 Million, who will step up and try for blowing a $Billion?
They're just looking for a way to diffuse culpability. The fact is that someone screwed up big time, and it cost someone else a metric crapload of money. That's how things are done in the U.S.
With all of the cost overruns, the wierd artwork, and the abandoned baggage system, DIA is still the single most usable airport in the United States.
1: There is more room for security which leads to shorter lines. Additionally, connecting flights don't require going through security again, further decreasing the load.
2: The airport design is simple and easy to understand. There is only one terminal building to arrive at, and the concourses are arranged logically.
3: The terminal is very nice - well lit and refresingly open. There is a distinct "open air" feeling that doesn't exist in many airports. There is a wide range of services as well - plenty of food, bookstores, coffee, etc.
4: Unlike Stapleton, snow doesn't shut down DIA.
5: The train system is fast and effective.
6: There is room for expansion, which is particularly important as Frontier expands (DIA is a major United hub, and the only Frontier hub).
7: The large size of the airport and openness of the runways make it easier to land and eaiser to route traffic.
DIA is the world's 10th largest airport. Give it a bit of credit.
But... but... I thought mainframes rocked our socks and needed more fresh blood to replace the greybeards? What's this with a mainframe not doing the job sufficiently???
(Disclaimer: to be fair, this is a strawman argument. I work in a heavily mainframe-dependent company and industry, and I have no doubt that the mainframe *could* have been programmed properly to handle the load. The real problem in this case were ones of mechanical engineering and bad design/system engineering... Things like bags being eaten by the machines and getting mis-routed and lost don't bode well for such a system. But there's nothing inherent in the project's concept that makes it necessarily impossible to implement.)
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Evidently they should have hired some better programmers.
$200k, I'll have it fixed in one year, and it'll run on their mainframe.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I agree with you, and I hope the following example can contribute.
The inventor of the japanese subway tickets system had the same problem (regarding users not being precise enough, sometimes the tickets would go sideways, etc). People were sick tired of having the machines eat their tickets just because they weren't in the right position.
He was so pressured that he almost gave up, so to clear his mind, he took a walk in the park. Then, as he was on a wooden bridge over a small river, he saw a leaf floating on the river moving against a rock. The leaf was perpendicular to the river flow, but then it collided with a small rock, that made it turn parallel with the flow.
Based on this idea, he implemented a small device consisting of a round piece of metal that would rotate the tickets to the correct order, so they would pass the magnetic scan. Currently this magnetic ticket system is implemented in many countries, including the mexican subway which is over 25 years old now.
So, in the end, it all comes to this: A well-designed system will pass even the worst conditions. The Denver Airport Baggage design team certainly needed to work more, and think of the worst cases - i.e. quasi-spherical (i.e. bloated) luggage.
Look at the problem domain.
1) it is a routing problem. Probably an NP problem like the traveling salesman problem but they wanted to solve it in *real time*. What is the best way to route a piece of luggage and get it to the correct gate so it can be loaded in time?
2) In addition to point 1, there is the added issue of the start and end points changing. This is more than a static routing problem, it is a dynamic problem., due to gate changes etc. It strikes me as a much harder problem.
Applying a little *gasp* *shudder* theory to the situation, the risk of failure becomes readily apparent that even before factoring in mechanical difficulties and the fact that no one ever built a system like this before that the risk of failure was very very high. The question becomes how many of the programmers and managers had the the needed theory, and ethical sense, to flag it as such.
But my sense of it is that
1) due to the rampant anti-intellectualism in much of IT and mangement no one could the bothered learning 'just theory'.
2) The managers just went into "we'll keep throwing code monkeys at it until it works' mode.
The moral: theory is important.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
While working for Morrison-Knudsen in Shreveport, I was asked to go out to Denver to "help out" for a couple of weeks on the startup of the baggage handling system.
Since that portion of DIA was DOA, I knew that a couple of weeks could easily turn into a couple of years. I wasn't interested in doing TDY for forever.
What made for sweet irony was that Denver took the baggage system away from MK because, in their words, "we couldn't handle the project".
And since the project had turned into such a political nightmare, I wasn't interested in getting into the middle of that mess.
Not that MK survived much longer...
I dream in binary.
They really need to start selling clues around here... wholesale.
There's zero commute time to the hotel.
Let me tell you a story. I work in the automation industry, and have for 5 to 8 years now, depending on when you start counting. When I started, I was so keen about automating everything. "Sure, we can make it do that!" All the experienced old fogies kept telling me to shut up in meetings because, absolutely we were NOT going to make it do that.
Now, 5 years later I've become the old fogie, parading the KISS principle around like it's a religion unto itself. I've seen first hand on many occasions how an overly complicated and overly automated system just isn't reliable. The main reason is that automation is not scalable unless its mass produced, and this type of system is always custom. Not only is the software custom, but the hardware itself is custom designed (from off the shelf components, of course).
Here's how it works (just like any software project)... the customer comes and wants a system. We, the integrator, bid on it. We get the job. We have a couple months of writing a functional spec, going back and forth over what the system has to do, and at every meeting they bring in another person who has another great idea about what it should be, sometimes contradicting the previous guy. Since I'm an old "unflexible" guy, many times I try to talk them out of these ideas, but sometimes you have to give in. If the customer wants to add 20% to the cost of the project, not to mention the complexity and maintenance costs, just so they don't have to spend as much time training their operators, then you do it. They never realize that means they have to hire a Ph.D. to fix the thing when it breaks down.
There are so many odd scenarios in a real life system that automating them all would cost so much more than just automating the first 90% and making sure that humans have all the info they need to handle the other 10% of whatever happens. That last 10% costs 10 times what the original 90% cost.
But try to make a customer understand that.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Involving the government in any way, shape, or form is the surest way to fail it.
I'm sorry people, but the government is simply not capable of delivering quality results. How much money, lives and time will be wasted until people figure this out?
Yeah, right.
I've worked at an airport years ago, and yes, for the most part the baggage handlers are pieces of crap. I hate to blame unions but in this case I will. They work great for about the first 90 minutes of their shift and after a break, the quality goes out the window. After seeing these clowns go to work on peoples baggage, deliberately roughing up luggage because it was in a new suitcase or even worse; opening and rifling through peoples shit and actually stealing stuff, and then having to deal with the SS guards at the baggage inspections, I take Amtrak whenever possible. It takes longer, but that's half the fun. Plus I can get hammered at the bar and smoke pot in my cabin.
I don't know about any conspiracy theories; what I do know is that the Denver Airport, in all its several manifestations, has been one giant fuckup from my first acquaintance with it back in 1968.
... never opened. I don't remember why.
.... methinks the conspiracy is to share the slashdotting ;)
I don't recall the order or details of the various fuckups, but as I vaguely recall some general problems:
The old airport was just plain old, neglected, and overloaded. Baggage and passenger areas were a day's hike apart, with no delivery system at all.
So they built a new airport. Years over schedule, it finally
So they built another one, and somehow managed to put it where it maximized the problems with planes icing up in bad weather. Anyone familiar with the local climate patterns could have told them this would happen (and probably did so), but they put it there anyway.
[I might have those two events out of chron order, but you get the idea.]
Last I heard, they were going to build yet another airport. I have no idea if it ever happened or not.
But from having many times shipped animals by air cargo, where you have to be aware of timing tolerances among connecting flights -- I can tell you that a change of planes takes 20 minutes in Salt Lake City or Minneapolis, but 2 or more hours in Denver, and it's always been that way. Yeah, Denver is a regional hub, but so is Minneapolis, so that's no excuse.
(Google: "Results 1 - 10 of about 2,220,000 for Denver International Airport"
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Ahhh yes;
;-)
Nothing like steel, aluminum, and concrete to give that wonderful acoustic signature so similar to garage raves back in the day!
Libertas in infinitum
At Moscow Sheremetyevo International Airport, the baggage is YOU!!
Hey, that makes quite a catchy slogan.
The government has delivered countly successfull projects in it's history.
Nobody 'needs' it "Unnder budget" if they did, That would be the budget. Dumb Ass
also, I see private companies fail at large projects all the time.
Most of the problems due to equipoment failer, logistics, and services in Irage right now is due to failurs/rip offs from private companies that aren't held to any where near the standards a government agency would be.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
as I recall, it was one of the largest installations of Netware 4 at the time (which was fighting its losing battle with NT 4.0). It was written up in several of the tech rags (Infoworld, Computer Week, etc), sort of positively hopeful that it might work....
But, obviously, it became difficult to appease the passive-aggressive baggage handlers inside.
But be even more carefull of the words NO PROTOTYPE for something new and unique
It's bloody hard to define the possible when you don't even know if its possible !!!!
The poor planning and consequential failure of DIA baggage handling system must have a great cause buried somewhere in a combination of arrogance, ignorance, and failure to learn from past SUCCESSES.
In 1981 Boeing and Eastern Air Lines and Delta unveiled William B. Hartsfield International (Atlanta) airport's people mover system and baggage handling system. The baggage handling system uses barcoded carts and scanners, magnetic field cart door stops, and more widgets that were state-of-the-art 25 years ago -- and the system still keeps on hauling bags.
(Before increased security) The baggage system was so fast and accurate that if you drove up to the terminal and gave the agent your bag and ticket, your bag would be on the airplane in about four minutes. You might not make your flight, but your bag was gone.
Eastern is gone and Delta took over the baggage systems and the airport grew. The system works great. Most of Delta's Atlanta baggage system "failures" occur when humans "cause" the failures.
So why wasn't DIA able to improve upon or even replicate the success of Atlanta ten years later? Isn't stealing code the highest form of flattery? Did they bother to talk to Boeing? Did they bother to find the engineers that made Atlanta a success? The Eastern engineers are obviously no longer employed at Eastern! (Note: Federal Express hired some of the Eastern engineers to work on their hubs.) (There was an unconfirmed rumor that when DIA's baggage system was unveiled to failure, they tried to track down the Eastern engineers to get them to fix it. I know that one Eastern engineer disconnected his phone to avoid any headhunters.)
I do think the NYT article is a little disingenuous -- with more than a little pro-union slant. If humans don't want a machine to work, they can make it not work. (Luddites and unions for example.) On the union's side: driving half way to Nebraska to catch a flight "from Denver" makes one wonder about the airport planners' competence...
BONUS for reading this far: Ever wonder why there is an underground tunnel from the high number gates of Atlanta's B concourse to the high number gates of C concourse, but there is no underground concourse at the low number gate ends? When Hartsfield was built, Delta had A concourse and the low half of B. Eastern had C concourse and high half of B. Eastern thought that it only made sense to connect the high ends to make it easier on the passengers, but Eastern didn't show all of its cards to Delta. When the airport was opened and the high B-C concourse tunnel was unveiled, Delta was surprised.
Proving once again that involving corporations in any way, shape, or form is the surest way to fail it.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Other than you wanting to have fun, is there any real reason you need to bank in different languages at any given ATM?
The simplist way I can think of would be to have a preference list.
IE Eng->German->Spanish->prompt
Yours would simply go straight to prompt, and would be usefull in the case of a card possibly being shared by people who speak/read different languages.
Of course, in order to do this we'd either have to change all the cards(as the account number is pretty much all the strip can handle), or have the machine query a variable attached to your account to pull up the preferences.
As far as it goes, the last option is to design the machine so you can do the common function(getting money), without needing to read the prompts. Improved graphical displays make this easier.
Personally, I've memorized the way to manipulate the machine using the keypad entirely, I find it works much faster. Don't need to see the screen at all.
I don't read AC A human right
The Case Study in this book on the Denver Airporty system is fascinating.
I work as a software engineer, and a large part of my focus is on making sure i have all the requirements up front. This book proves the validity of the approach.
The Denver Baggage System is the first case study in the book. The project was from hell. Computers were not a primary cause of failure. The refusal for the entire project to work as a team was the primary cause of failure.
You'd be amazed: In a large city with multiple unions, failure of the project seems to be an unspoken goal of vindictive groups. When the mayor starts touting the economic benefits of the new airport,and provides release dates before or in the very early stages of construction, and basically guarantees the completion of the project, the union laborers lick their chops. They cause problems, generating the guaranteed overtime. They don't even have to deliberately try to cause problems. They can just do a literal translation of union rules, and claim 'Not my Job'. Innovative technology requires new methods of work. Union rules don't accomodate automation very well.
Similar to the Dilbert where PHB states "For every bug found, i'll reward the employee with $1." Wally's response: "I'm gonna write myself a minivan."
It's possible to build in a lot of fail-safe detection though. Have a look about for information on the suspension system used in big Citroëns. There are sensors in the steering, front anti-roll bar, gearbox, throttle and braking system to tell an ECU what the car is doing at any given time, and adjust the damping and spring rate of the suspension to suit. Throw it into a corner at high speed, brake hard, or snap the throttle open and it will stiffen up.
The clever bit is if a sensor fails, though. If (for instance) the speed sensor fails, the ECU will correlate the vertical suspension movement, steering movement, and braking system pressure. If it doesn't all add up, it sets the suspension into "hard" mode and leaves it that way, which makes the car very stable but also very harsh and uncomfortable to drive (think sporty BMW). So then it's sitting there thinking "Aha! The front just sank a little, and there's a lot of pressure in the brakes, so we must be slowing down - but there's nothing from the speed sensor! Safe mode..."
> ... after a break, the quality goes out the window.
That must be 'cause they smoke too much weed on their break.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Yeah, right.
Well, being a particle physicist I've got a pretty big stick to shake. The biggest machine in the world was actually the LEP accelerator at CERN, shortly to be replaced by the LHC also at CERN. In terms of accelerators I doubt a baggage handling system will reach quite the same energies although that would explain the condition of my bags when handed back on occasion.
Now it is true that the LEP ring is only 27km in circumference. However it truly is a single machine: your bagage handling system consists of lots of machines acting under a single controller. If one train breaks down it might block the tunnel it is in but it does not stop all the other machines from working (although may be it does and that is why they need to replace it?). If one part of LEP breaks down then the accelerator will not work until it is fixed or mitigated by some other means.
Finally if you are not convinced by that argument then you would also have to include all new automated mass transit systems as single machines e.g. Jubliee, victoria and Dockland light railway lines (maybe more by now?) of the London tube system. These total to over 30 miles and so would be a bigger machine.
... if we just uprgade to Service Pack 2, right?
This sig is false.
Some years ago I was told by a guy at an RTOS (Real Time Operating System) company that the original major problem was that they were too clueless to use an RTOS, and that this was incredibly dumb, since it was a real time problem, with baggage whizzing around at comparatively high speeds and needing to be routed right/left at various junctures at just the right time.
Non-real-time OSes have thread/process delays that effectively follow something like a Bell curve; arbitrarily large and unpredictable delays can happen randomly.
He refused to name the OS they did use (this was in a public setting, on the record, where there might have been some legal liability), but general context strongly suggested it was a Microsoft OS (and whether you like or dislike Windows or NT, Microsoft most definitely doesn't do real time). (Nor does MacOS nor the most common flavors of Unix/Linux, although there are real-time variants.)
On the other hand he also said that they switched to an RTOS, at a huge cost of money and time, before they could seriously try to bring the baggage system fully live at all, so apparently that wouldn't have been the final issue, only the first disaster.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary