Baggage process and data elements - airport perspective

The process

IATA has the following figure which describes the baggage process at a high level.

The figure is a good description of the high level process. However, to understand what happens inside a baggage handling system (BHS) it is necessary with a more detailed understanding of the steps 2, 3, 4 and 5. 

Data

It is necessary to collect data about a bag from many places in the baggage process to be able to:

• to document what actually happened to a bag, including finding it if it became lost.
• predict in real time if a bag is likely to become a problem bag, which makes it possible to avoid it.
• analyze the baggage processes to find problem areas and to document conformance to any service level agreement.

To easily understand the collected data the data elements need to be strictly defined and the same set of data definitions used from all data sources. The data sources might send data using different formats. All formats should then be transformed to the common format.

All further discussion here is based on data elements defined by the Airport Data Dictionary, Mapping from IATA data formats are documented here: Mapping of IATA baggage data formats to ADD