The Area 52 of smart tech!

02nd July 2018
The Area 52 of smart tech!

 An underground R&D centre in Bangalore,  controls aircraft movements across  the globe, and a lot of other things
July 2 2018: If you know what Area 52 is, or if you have just googled it,  you know it is an underground laboratory of sorts that monitors and researches  extremely innovative high-tech, even alien  activities.  There's a mini Area 52 of sorts, in India -- the Honeywell Technology Solutions (HTS) Bangalore centre.
Imagine a flight coming into an airport in the Middle East. Right after landing, the cockpit screen displays a moving map guiding the aircraft through a maze of parking bays, parked aircraft and routes to reach the closest gate, in the shortest possible time. Now imagine all of this is done remotely from the HTS office. There are multiple co-ordinates to be monitored: real-time air traffic over the airport, number of aircraft scheduled for take-off and landing and the route paths they have been allocated, priority aircraft, among others. This is just one of many technologies that Honeywell has created and manages out of India. The same aircraft, if it were a new-gen Bombardier, would be powered by Honeywell's cockpit management system that provides AI-enabled live weather, shortest flight paths and emergency warnings in real-time. Honeywell's aviation teams are currently collecting data (in Big Data proportions) of weather data around the world and creating a live system that predicts unexpected weather conditions in almost real-time -- and all of it in 3D as against traditional 2D.
Teams at the Bangalore HTS  also manage surveillance of  upcoming 'smart cities' like Aurangabad, Rajkot and Bhubaneshwar, including security cameras for traffic and street lighting.  
To cash in on the sudden surge of e-commerce in India, Honeywell has  introduced a connected freight solution  that aims to reduce losses and waste of commodities in transit. Each commodity will have a sensor tag that measures temperature, shock, tilt, humidity etc and keeps pinging the sender and/or receiver. In the event of an 'event' relevant alarms are raised...especially helpful if the consignment is  meat, vegetables or other perishables.  
Honeywell hopes that this solution will help logistics companies work more efficiently towards ensuring that their parcels reach the right place at the right time!
- Vishnu Anand in Bangalore