During the T-Systems Symposium 2013, Airbus has introduced Bag2Go an intelligent suitcase which can travel completely independently and transported to the destination without the owner. Travelers Airbus want to allow more flexibility and mobility by arriving the target free of luggage by plane, ship, train, car, bike or by foot. The Bag2Go service relies on the business cloud infrastructure of T-Systems.
Background of Bag2Go
A Bag2Go is self-weighing, self-labeling, self-travelling, self-tracing and has features of a continuous tracking. In addition, according to Airbus, it consistently adhere with all common standards today, so that the current infrastructure at airports must not be changed. Using a smartphone app the status and whereabouts can constantly be monitored.
Airbus plans to cooperate with different transport services (eg DHL). So, for example, the traveler can fly by plane to the destination, but his baggage arrive by land, ship or another aircraft to the target. Package services or door-to-door luggage transportation services to provide transportation of luggage to any destination in inland or abroad in a hotel or cruise booking.
A follow-up is generally convenient, but makes only sense if one can also intervene in the action. For this purpose, Airbus relies on a GPS tracking in conjunction with a transport service provider, such as transportation / logistics or the airline.
Motivation of Airbus
Airbus has obviously developed the concept Bag2Go not without self-interest. The point is to make the first steps for the aircraft of the future. This means that Airbus is building sustainable and ultra-light aircrafts, for which is as little weight as possible required. At the same time, fuel consumption is significantly decreasing. To remove the heavy luggage from the plane is the key component. The separation of passenger and baggage streams to enable Airbus and the entire industry to control the carriage of baggage proactively and open up completely new business opportunities.
According to Airbus, the containerization of luggage is continuously gaining in importance as more and more people will take a door-to-door transport in and claim their baggage up to three days prior to departure or use a baggage kiosk. For this reason, Airbus will try to establish fully networked transport capsules as a standard.
Interesting approach – but not for everyone
Airbus faces with his concept less technical but more legal problems. Means a traveler and his luggage need to fly together. A suitcase can fly afterwards the passenger, but not ahead. In addition, business executives challenged the three days in advance luggage check-in during the presentation, because they pack their suitcase itself up to one hour before the flight. A few more conversations after the presentation confirmed the general opinion and attitudes of business travelers on the subject.
Nevertheless, Bag2Go is an interesting concept we will see soon in reality. At the same time it is a great use case for the Internet of Things. Bag2Go forms an analogous to the architecture of the Internet routing, where a single IP packet, normally associated with a complete data stream, can also take different paths to the goal.
