Real-Time Insights for Airlines with Complex Event Processing

Introduction

Businesses are embracing real-time data processing to better handle their ever-increasing data volumes, and to enable faster, more informed decision-making. Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Dynamic CEP are powerful tools that allow you to detect event patterns in endless streams of events, helping you pinpoint critical insights and focus on the data that truly matters.

Apache Flink® is the de-facto gold standard for real-time data processing, and its built-in CEP library makes it easy to apply Complex Event Processing to streaming data, allowing businesses to define and track patterns across event streams, including detecting specific sequences and conditions that are important to their operations. As a result, teams can set up alerts, make adjustments, and trigger automated responses based on real-time, current events.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how CEP delivers practical benefits specifically to the airline industry, where real-time detection, monitoring, and event optimization are crucial. We’ll also introduce Dynamic CEP, a unique capability found only in Ververica's Unified Streaming Data Platform that provides the ability to adjust patterns and rules as conditions evolve.

We’ll walk through examples including:

• Monitoring flight delays,
• Managing security alerts, and
• Improving turnaround times for aircraft.

Lastly, we’ll discuss the importance of Dynamic Complex Event Processing, and the ability to adjust rules as conditions evolve, so businesses can stay responsive without downtime.

What is Complex Event Processing?

CEP is a tool that identifies patterns, trends, and sequences within real-time data streams. Rather than analyzing events in isolation, CEP connects multiple events to provide a holistic view of the current state, helping organizations to see and understand a complete picture of their operations.

Figure 1: From Data Ingestion to Output: How the CEP Engine Works

The visual above (Figure 1) demonstrates how CEP works. Data enters via the input event streams, and moves through the CEP engine, where the patterns and rules that require identification have been defined. The engine continuously monitors the input data streams, applying the defined rules. When a match is identified, CEP outputs that matching event, allowing the business to take action directly.

Complex Event Processing enables businesses to track critical interactions, detect risks, and initiate automated responses in real-time. The result is an environment where critical insights are identified and reported as they happen, enabling more efficient and effective operations.

Imagine a system monitoring thousands of real-time data streams simultaneously, such as aircraft movements, weather updates, and passenger information. While individual data points may seem insignificant on their own, analyzing them as part of a larger sequence can reveal critical insights. CEP empowers organizations to define specific patterns and rules that in turn trigger automated actions or alerts the moment those predefined conditions are met, unlocking value which is often otherwise hidden (or very hard to correlate) in event streams.

Why is Complex Event Processing Important?

While CEP is a powerful feature that many industries utilize to solve various use cases, some benefits that CEP provides specifically for the airline industry include:

• Cost and Resource Optimization: By catching potential disruptions early, airlines can avoid costly delays, improve resource allocation, and optimize schedules.
• Proactive Operations: Identifying patterns in real-time allows teams to be notified and to act on potential disruptions before they escalate to business critical downtime. This allows teams to be proactive and help avoid costly delays while optimizing workflows.
• Passenger Experience Enhancement: Flight schedules, security, and ground operations can be proactively managed, helping deliver a smoother, more predictable experience to passengers (i.e. a better customer experience in an industry with slim margins and heavy competition).
• Support for Operational Agility: Airlines can adapt swiftly and respond dynamically to evolving industry demands and conditions, including adjusting schedules based on weather changes, quickly implementing new security protocols, or meeting new regulatory requirements.

Fundamentally, CEP makes it possible to define, monitor, and act upon complex patterns across data streams.

Complex Event Processing Applications in the Airline Industry

Next, let’s explore three specific common use cases for CEP for the airline industry, including examples of how Apache Flink’s CEP library supports these applications.

1. Flight Delay Detection Due to Weather Conditions

Flight delays are one of the most common and costly disruptions to the airline industry, and are typically caused by and related to adverse weather conditions. Because weather conditions can significantly impact flight schedules, quick decision-making to manage resources, notify passengers, and adjust downstream flight is required.

With CEP, you can monitor both flight schedules and weather data streams together and detect potential delays in real time. To accomplish this, a team can define a rule that monitors sequences where adverse weather events coincide with scheduled departure or arrival times, and be able to take action before the delay escalates.

2. Monitoring and Escalating Security Incidents

Security is a top priority and identifying potential risks, (like unattended luggage or other suspicious activities) is essential for passenger safety. However, monitoring security issues in real-time across a busy terminal is challenging and can strain resources when attempted without utilizing automated support.

With CEP enabled, you can detect unattended luggage or other suspicious activities. By simultaneously monitoring data from security cameras, passenger movement, and IoT-enabled luggage tags, CEP can identify when a bag is left stationary in a public area without a nearby passenger. If the luggage remains unattended for a specific amount of time, a security alert can be set to automatically trigger.

Real-time monitoring of security risks helps improve airport safety and allows airlines to respond to potential threats faster, reducing operational disruptions and enhancing passenger and customer confidence. By automating detection, security teams can focus on handling incidents rather than manually scanning for them.

3. Analyzing Aircraft Turnaround Times to Optimize Ground Operations

Aircraft turnaround time is critical for operational efficiency. Delays in unloading, refueling, cleaning, and boarding can quickly escalate, causing cascading delays for other flights and disrupting airport schedules, potentially resulting in monetary penalties and customer dissatisfaction.

With CEP, you can monitor the series of events involved in aircraft turnaround and detect any delays in real-time. From gate arrival to boarding, by tracking each step in the turnaround process, you can quickly highlight bottlenecks or delays that need intervention.

For instance, if you detect that disembarkation is taking longer than expected, ground operations can be alerted to prioritize other steps, reducing the overall delay. With this level of granular insight, every stage of the turnaround process can be optimized, resulting in a more predictable service and improved experience for passengers.

Dynamic Complex Event Processing

Now, here’s where things get really interesting.

Businesses and their data needs are constantly evolving, requiring data monitoring rules to change and update also. But what happens when you need to change a pattern or add a new rule? Traditional systems required downtime to update, which is a major issue for industries (like airlines) that operate 24/7.

Ververica’s Unified Streaming Data Platform, powered by the VERA engine, solves this by offering Dynamic CEP, which allows instant updates to processing rules without interrupting operations. Quite literally, Dynamic CEP provides the capability for you to update and modify your event processing rules in-flight. For example, if you need to re-define the average time window for an aircraft turnaround, or update a security risk, you can update these patterns instantly, without disrupting your data stream or causing downtime. With Dynamic CEP, you can modify patterns and rules on the fly, while your system keeps running, as shown in Figure 2:

Figure 2: Dynamic CEP with Ververica’s Unified Streaming Data Platform

Dynamic Complex Event Processing is important because it allows:

• Continuous Operations: Dynamic CEP eliminates the need for restating applications or downtime when updating rules, ensuring that real-time insights are uninterrupted.
• Instant Adaptability: Business rules can be adjusted as conditions change, allowing teams to respond to events like weather disruptions or heightened security needs faster and without disrupting current workflows.
• Scalable Efficiency: Dynamic rule updates support long-term scalability, allowing airlines to fine-tune operations without the need to overhaul existing systems or workflows.

For example, if a new security policy reduces the unattended luggage threshold from 10 minutes to 5 minutes, Dynamic CEP makes it possible to implement this change immediately. In a traditional setup, such changes might require downtime and testing, but with Dynamic CEP, updates happen in real-time, keeping operations seamless and efficient.

Conclusion

Complex Event Processing offers a scalable, real-time solution to many of the challenges facing the airline industry. By enabling immediate insights into flight delays, security incidents, and ground operations, (in addition to various other use cases) CEP empowers airlines to optimize performance, drive cost savings, reduce risks, and deliver a better user experience for all passengers.

CEP provides a turnkey library that transforms operations by providing the tools needed to detect, analyze, and act on real-time insights. Dynamic CEP, available exclusively in Ververica’s Unified Streaming Data Platform, powered by the VERA engine, takes this one step further by allowing rules to be updated on the fly, ensuring applications remain responsive to changing conditions without downtime.

Learn More about CEP

[Video] Watch the video: Understanding Complex Event Processing with Applications in E-Commerce Platforms for examples of how CEP correlates data into actionable insight, including: 

• Cross-sell and upsell opportunities
• High value card abandonment detection
• Purchase intent scoring
• Price sensitivity detection
• Churn prediction

Related Resources

[Case Study] Download: How Ververica Transformed Real-Time Intelligence at Airbus to learn how Ververica helps Airbus to deploy Apache Flink at scale. 

[Demo] Try out CEP for yourself! Create a real-time streaming application using CEP and Apache Flink that:

• Detects flight delays correlated with adverse weather conditions.
• Monitors and escalates security incidents (e.g., unattended luggage).
• Analyzes aircraft turnaround times to optimize ground operations.

Ready to utilize Dynamic CEP to make updates to your rule set without downtime? Contact Ververica to get started.