Dublin Airport Authority (DAA) is a global airports and travel group with businesses in 13 countries and headquartered at Dublin airport. It employs 3500 people in Ireland and has a turnover in the region of €897 million. Dublin airport is Ireland’s largest international air gateway with over 32.9 million passengers passing through in 2019. 

Dublin airport can experience up 740 aircraft movements per day which must be coordinated by ATC utilising ground personnel and systems. Rockbrook were tasked with implementing a key piece of critical infrastructure the Airfield Lighting & Aircraft Ground Orientation System. The system is required to monitor and manage 3500 airfield lights and 88 generators.

Critical requirements for this system were reliability, redundancy, ease of use and a comprehensive post project support service. Reliability was achieved using quality automation hardware and robust application software from the Siemens Simatic Industrial Automation portfolio. Redundancy was achieved by implementation of redundant server pairs, purpose built redundant PLC configurations and network infrastructure redundancy.

Ease of use was achieved through constant interaction between Rockbrook’s software development team and DAA operations personnel who would be using the system. Through close interaction Rockbrook established exactly how Air Traffic Controllers interacted with the system in live environments. This enabled the developed of intuitive and easy to use graphical interfaces which formed the front end of a powerful airfield management SCADA system.