LocON: A location based services platform to improve airport safety

Location and context awareness services have generated a lot of interest in the recent years, becoming a key feature to many applications of mobile devices. The rapid development in wireless communications and in satellite navigation systems also contributed to the popularity of location based services. The location technologies when properly combined can provide valuable event driven services to notify users about ongoing occurrences, creating important advances in surveillance activities. This is particularly relevant for operational environments where surveillance of surface movement´s through electronic means represents a major challenge. Although advantages in location based services have opened up new perspectives at validating safety and security requirements in environments such as airports, harbours, or industrial plants, there are, however different ways to look at these services to provide location awareness. This paper presents a contribution developed in an European research project called LocON that implements a generic platform to provide a set of location based services using different wireless location technologies. The location awareness provided by the LoCON platform relies on multiple location-based technologies which cooperate at providing the data to a middleware layer. Based on a data fusion process the positioning data are passed to the application layer enabling operational decision makers to monitor and track events according to business logic. LocON is being tested at Faro airport in Portugal to validate how well it can improve airport safety and security procedures.