September 2007

Vanderlande Industries have selected ESP to support the Baggage Reconciliation hardware at London Heathrow’s flagship Terminal 5

The £4.3bn high-tech Terminal 5 which opens in March 2008 is the largest free standing structure in the UK and covers the same area as 50 football fields.  Passengers are offered unparalleled standards of comfort and convenience with smoother check-in processes, a state-of-the-art baggage management system and the largest lounge complex in the world.

Vanderlande Industries specialise in providing automated material handling systems.  The baggage handling system installed by them in T5 is the biggest, single terminal installation in Europe made up of 17km of conveyor equipment controlled by 118 servers and able to process 12,000 bags an hour.

All bags have to go through a number of standard processes, which are built into the system design. Examples of such processes include automatic bar code scanning for identification, hold baggage screening and baggage registration to enable the ‘tracking & tracing’ of individual bags.  It is the hardware for this Baggage Reconciliation System (BRS) that ESP supports.

“ESP was selected to support the T5 BRS hardware because of our proven capabilities in providing support in this unique environment,” comments Darren Richardson, MD of ESP. “We have developed bespoke tools that address the fundamental issues presented as well as proposing novel solutions to long standing problems.”

An interim service will start in October with a full service due to start early in 2008.