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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."
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.
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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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.
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"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?
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.