Networked airport systems help travelers find their way - United Airlines subsidiary Covia Corp. devises integrated network

Software Magazine, March 15, 1990 by Sharon Fisher

NETWORKED AIRPORT SYSTEMS HELP TRAVELERS FIND THEIR WAY

On the day that IBM announced its PS/2 line of personal computers and OS/2 operating system, Covia Corp., the computer system subsidiary of United Airlines, announced that it was going to use the new second generation of products across its family of airline reservation and airport information systems.

That April 1987 order--amounting to millions of dollars--was one of the first IBM received from a major user. It was also the implementation of Covia's master architectural plan for disseminating information.

"Covia developed a plan for integrating systems, and that's really our whole mission," said Janet Wejman, manager of micro infrastructure development for Covia in Rosemont, Ill. "In developing this plan, we realized we wanted to write our own applications, but also integrate the best of the software and hardware solutions.

"To do that, not only did we have to have an architectural plan, but also a mechanism to use our applications with other vendor solutions. So we had to come up with an infrastructure that would allow different applications to speak to different vendor solutions," Wejman said.

That's what Covia's Open Systems Manager (OSM) architecture is all about. And the company has taken the same infrastructure and applied it to travel agencies, reservations offices and other airports, Wejman said.

Covia first implemented its OSM in United's "Terminal for Tomorrow" at O'Hare, in August 1987. The building is aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate. With more than 300 computer-controlled signs, travelers can check the gate number for their flight from various locations. Those signs are also linked to other applications, such as the arrival and departure monitors, the gate assignment system and signs indicating which conveyor belt a flight's baggage is on.

Those applications are all microcomputer-based and execute on one of the largest 4M bit/sec token-ring networks in the world, Wejman said.

In total, Covia integrated products from more than 40 vendors to produce the O'Hare system. "No one vendor would solve all the different processing needs that O'Hare has," she added.

After considering O'Hare's operation-critical environment, where, if something went down, operations would stop, Wejman said the company chose a token-ring network.

At the time, choosing which vendor to supply the token-ring network for the PCs was easy, Wejman said: IBM was the only company that had a Token-Ring network. But in addition, Covia felt the quality of IBM's product was excellent, she added.

According to Wejman, the solutions chosen were very much a team effort. However, she credits Mrk Teslian, CIO and vice president of tactical planning, systems engineering and development, as the "visionary."

O'Hare's network can support up to 2,000 nodes, although it began with just 500 to 700. In addition to the PS/2s--some of which were diskless Model 50s, which Covia had ordered custom-made from IBM--the network also includes PS/2 Model 60s and the Business Pro machines from Texas Instruments, Plano, Texas, as servers.

PCs are located behind gates, in operational and in business areas, as well as in the terminal's system control center, Wejman said.

Covia also linked microcomputers based on the Motorola 68010 microprocessor to the Token-Ring network to provide flight information on more than 900 television monitors. These systems are also linked to a broadband network with hundreds of channels, Wejman said.

"We got flight information from a Unisys [mainframe] host, brought it to the Token-Ring network, processed it, and sent it over a broadband network for distribution" to the flight information display stations, she said.

In addition, O'Hare's Gate Assignment Display System runs on an Ethernet network to communicate with the mainframe and display gate assignments using the Explorer PCs from Texas Instruments.

TRAVEL AND RESERVATIONS

Covia also used PS/2s, both third-party and Covia-written software, local area networks, and wide area networks to link its numerous travel, reservation and airport agencies. More than 1,000 agencies--approximately 10% of the total--have the new technology, and Covia is installing the system in about 50 new agencies per month, Wejman said.

At the centerpiece of the system is Scriptwriter, a Covia-written macro language that allows the scripting of responses from the various agencies to multiple systems hosts, Wejman said. "What they can do is develop little conversations with the use of Scriptwriter, which not only interprets the response but has a presentation function."

Within an individual agency office, an IBM Token-Ring network links the workstations. The Token-Ring network is linked to Covia's Apollo reservation system in Denver, which runs on several IBM- and IBM-compatible mainframes under IMB's MVS operating system and Transaction Processing Facility, over a wide area network of 1.5M bit/sec T1 links, she said.

At present, the Covia-written agency PC software runs under MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. "We are targeting our agencies for OS/2 servers this year, but no agency has an OS/2 server at this point," said Wejman.