To continue the previous “Past Pleasures” post: here’s a video of the baggage handling system at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. I have worked as a developer first, later on as a test engineer on this system. I think my former (indirect) managers (the IBM people in the video, Remco Sierat and Hans Deijkers) are able to explain the thinking behind this awesome project well. (although I am also painfully aware that their english could be improved).
Working on such large-scale automated systems is ridiculously interesting. The complexity and scale of an airport wide, electro-mechanical system, means that you can never just shut-down something for maintenance or testing. Everything is connected all the time. I learned so much here. And more importantly, it gave me (and many of my friends and co-workers) the foundation to go onto building a brand new, even more complex system at Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5. More about that in a future post.
