Adan Banda and Brandon Mann

This interview was recorded by Todd Danielson, the editorial director of Informed Infrastructure. You can listen to the full interview by visiting iimag.link/DBTFe.

Adan Banda is senior geospatial data manager at DFW Airport; Brandon Mann is geospatial analyst at DFW Airport.

Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) operates as its own municipality—complete with its own ZIP Code; fire, police and SWAT teams; utilities and road networks; even cemeteries—making it one of the most complex infrastructure environments anywhere. Adan Banda and Brandon Mann work as part of a team using technology to digitize the system and make it more accessible and easier to work with by all.

Making DFW More AWARE

DFW has developed and deployed AWARE (Advanced Warning and Response Exchange), an interconnected system that ingests live sensor data from air handler units, chillers, fan boxes and all the other airport assets to help utilities staff set performance parameters and receive alerts when equipment operates outside acceptable ranges.

“You can set buffer ranges, and you can receive notifications if a fan has been running too long or the output temperature is too high or too low,” explains Mann. The system works predictively and retrospectively. Knowing that Terminal C gates will be heavily occupied for the next six hours, for example, utilities staff can proactively push HVAC assets harder in that zone rather than waiting for heat complaints to arrive.

The Data Foundation

Before any new digital twin such as AWARE can be effective, the underlying utility network data must be as accurate as possible. “If those are not sound, you will flounder very quickly,” notes Banda. For DFW, this meant extensive QA/QC of existing asset records—verifying manhole numbers, hydrant locations, fiber line routing—before any data enter the system. In addition to the easier elements to geolocate inside each terminal, gate and room, it’s essential to have BIM models with accurate Z-values for assets between floors, inside walls and below grade.

For organizations that don’t have clean data, Banda and Mann offer pragmatic advice to move forward. “Use what you have,” says Banda. “If it’s in a tabular form, if you just have rough as-builts, start there. See if you have anything tagged. If you don’t, there’s always vendors and consultants out there [to help]. Pull those files out of the file cabinet and start to digitize.”

Mann adds that perfection isn’t a prerequisite. “You don’t need to have perfect data.” In fact, he believes helping others new to digital processes builds buy-in as you work together to create the underlying system. “As long as you’re showing that you care about their data as much as they do, they’re going to continuously improve.”

Mann has a rule of thumb for knowing when data are ready enough to move forward: if the stakeholder’s own QA process makes sense from a GIS perspective—if it’s parallel, for example, to what he’d do using Esri’s ArcGIS Survey123 and Field Maps—then it’s far enough along to proceed.

Find Your Champion

Both Banda and Mann identify stakeholder buy-in as the single most-critical factor for success—more important than data completeness, tooling or technical sophistication.

“You have to find a stakeholder first that’s going to be your champion,” explains Mann. “You don’t want to spend too much time building datasets or tools for a department that ultimately doesn’t care.” At DFW, that champion is the HVAC group within the utilities department. “They were ready to go. They were interested, always providing feedback. There’s only so far you can go if you don’t know what the end goal is.”

Banda extends that advice beyond airports: “Whether you work in local government, the military, a DOT or a bank—make sure you have the right stakeholder, the end user, calling the shots on how things should look. It’s really for them. It’s not for IT people; it’s not for GIS people. We’re just there to support.”

He also cautioned against a common GIS pitfall: organizations over-purchasing vendor solutions for problems that inhouse GIS staff can solve. “Make yourself present,” encourages Banda. “Make sure other people know what you do and how you can help them. That way they’re calling on you—you become a source of truth.”

What’s Next

The current workflow still requires human decision-making to assign and dispatch work orders when alerts arrive. Banda and Mann see automated work-order routing as the next phase, eliminating the manual step of a supervisor deciding who goes where. “That’s where we’d like to be,” adds Banda. “The interface was the heavy lift. Going forward, assigning out these work orders automatically when issues happen—that’s
the goal.”