Connected Places Catapult has announced the set of three companies chosen to trial new solutions as part of the Connected Airport Living Lab at Glasgow Airport.
The programme, which is funded by Innovate UK, is now in its fourth year, and aims to provide small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with opportunities to develop, test and demonstrate late-stage technologies within a live airport environment.
By providing a structured, repeatable approach aligned to airport procurement and operational realities, the programme seeks to accelerate both innovation adoption and scaling across UK airports.
The programme itself is run in collaboration with Glasgow Airport, which has identified three core challenges for potential innovators:
- Management of large airport asset performance (such as escalators, lifts, scanners and car park barriers)
- Understanding passenger sentiment in order to improve airport experiences
- Combining passenger sentiment and feedback data from a variety of sources (such as social media, intelligent voice recognition and formal complaints)
Funding of 30,000 GBP and bespoke commercial support will be made available to selected applicants, as well as other benefits including existing connections with industry stakeholders and access to airport facilities in order to trial their solutions.
Chosen Organisations – CaaS, LiDAR and NLP Technology
The three organisations chosen are Beam Connectivity, Createc and Wordnerds, all of which will strive to provide bespoke, forward-thinking technology that aims to address one or more of the core challenges previously posed by Glasgow Airport.
Beam Connectivity will look to implement its Connectivity as a Service (CaaS) platform, which will be trialled as part of Connected Airport Living Lab. The technology provides real-time visibility into asset health and performance in a bid to help engineering teams reduce disruption, increase operational efficiency and deliver more reliable passenger journeys.
Createc, a UK technology company specialising in robotics, artificial intelligence and advanced sensing for complex environments, will trial Situate, which combines anonymous LiDAR movement data with live passenger feedback in order to understand how crowding, queues, waiting and movement affect the airport experience. The technology will provide a live experience score, trends and early warnings in an effort to help airport teams identify pressure, intervene sooner and assess recovery.
Finally, Wordnerds, a customer feedback analysis solution that uses the latest Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning technology to help organisations turn disparate customer feedback into actionable insight, will be used to create bespoke models trained on passenger feedback and operational data to understand what’s driving satisfaction. The trial will utilise both AI and agentic reporting capabilities in order to provide actionable insight across the business.
Gavin Birch-Williams, Managing Director of Glasgow Airport said:Glasgow Airport has become a proving ground for innovative technologies that can solve real operational challenges while improving the passenger experience.
The success of previous cohorts has demonstrated the value of giving SMEs access to a live airport environment, allowing them to test and refine their solutions in real-world conditions.
We’re looking forward to working with this next generation of innovators whose wide and varied skillsets will help us better understand passenger needs, improve the performance of critical assets, and support the delivery of a smoother, more efficient airport experience.
