Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Tony Spear was project manager of the Mars Pathfinder mission. He said, “It is just
as hard to do Mars missions now as it was in the mid-70s. I'm a big believer that software
hasn't gone anywhere. Software is the number-one problem” [29].
Several years after Spear made this observation, NASA successfully landed two Mars
Exploration Rovers on the Red Planet [30]. The rovers, named Opportunity and Spirit,
were launched from Earth in June and July of 2003, successfully landing on Mars in
January 2004. Mission planners had hoped that each rover would complete a three-
month mission, looking for clues that the Martian surface once had enough water to
sustain life. The rovers greatly exceeded this goal. The Spirit rover operated successfully
for more than five years. Opportunity found evidence of a former saltwater lake and was
still operational ten years after its launch.
As airline passenger traffic strained the capacity of Stapleton International Airport,
the City and County of Denver planned the construction of a much larger airport.
Stapleton International Airport had earned a reputation for slow baggage handling, and
the project planners wanted to ensure the new airport would not suffer from the same
problem. They announced an ambitious plan to create a one-of-a-kind, state-of-the-art
automated baggage handling system for the Denver International Airport (DIA).
The airport authorities signed a $193 million contract with BAE Automated Sys-
tems to design and build the automated baggage-handling system, which consisted of
thousands of baggage carts traveling roller-coaster-style on 21 miles of metal tracks. Ac-
cording to the design, agents would label a piece of luggage and put it on a conveyor
belt. Computers would route each bag along one or more belts until they reached a
cart-loading point, where each bag would be loaded into its own tub-like cart. Scanners
would read the destination information from the suitcase label, and computers would
then route each cart along the tracks at 20 miles per hour to the correct unloading point,
where each bag would be unloaded onto a conveyor belt and carried to its final destina-
tion. To monitor the movement of the bags, the system used 56 bar code scanners and
5,000 electric eyes.
There were problems from the outset of the project. The airport design was already
completed before the baggage-handling system was chosen. As a result, the underground
tunnels were small and had sharp turns, making it difficult to shoehorn in an automated
baggage system. And given its ambitious goals, the project timeline was too short.
However, the most important problem with the automated baggage handler was
that the complexity of the system exceeded the ability of the development team to
understand it. Here are a few of the problems BAE encountered:
.
Luggage carts were misrouted and failed to arrive at their destinations.
.
Computers lost track of where the carts were.
.
Bar code printers didn't print tags clearly enough to be read by scanners.
.
Luggage had to be correctly positioned on conveyors in order to load properly.
.
Bumpers on the carts interfered with the electric photocells.
