I got a job! Someone I know works at an urban planning firm / consultancy. They have very skilled planners and GIS experts but nobody to bridge the gap between the two, so they're asking me to improve that. It's likely going to be a summer job for me that continues as a flexible job alongside my study. It sounds like fun and I can use the monies. Maybe it turns out to suck but I'll give it a shot for sure. In other good news, we just presented the baggage handling system our group designed to an engineering company that designs automated systems for every big airport, warehouse and distribution center on the planet. They wanted a followup because they're working on something very similar and liked our design. I put a lot of thought into this course and this design so it feels awesome to get that kind of approval.
Make sure you capitalize on this. Get something with their letterhead and somebody with an important sounding title's signature that says this or something to that effect and it will go far I suspect.They wanted a followup because they're working on something very similar and liked our design.
Depending on how frequently you travel, you may have seen some places where they have baggage dropoff points where you enter your bag into a unit and it goes straight into a system. Our challenge was to design a similar system, but for baggage pickup, mostly as a engineering design challenge. So instead of waiting endlessly at a carrousel with everyone else crowded together and no idea where your bag is or when it will be there, we designed a system where your bag is placed in a secure locker that you can open with your boarding pass. Lockers are feeded by a bag rail system and individual bag carts. The idea is that every bag has an ETA and just one specific locker that it will be in. Instead of everyone going to one carrousel, you have a room with aisles of these lockers, dispersing the crowd. Here's two images I drew for the assignment: While there was an excursion planned to Siemens (cancelled because flying up and down to Frankfurt on the same day was too expensive), it wasn't them but Vanderlande, responsible for almost all of Schiphol's baggage handling systems. I was supposed to go to Schiphol and take a look at that system on Monday, but that sadly got postponed to a few weeks from now.
That's a pretty great project, I like it. Is it part of a university class? I didn't know Vanderlande did airport baggage automation too, I've only seen a little of their parcel systems. Siemens owns a ridiculous number of companies, but I'm assuming the Siemens you were going to visit was a branch of their Postal, Parcel, & Airport Logistics company. I didn't know there was a Frankfurt site, I work for Siemens in the U.S.
Siemens is Big with a capital B. I keep discovering new subdivisions, most recently their metro rolling stock. About 40% of Vanderlande business is baggage, 20% parcel, 20% warehouse. The course is only on BHS, so it made sense to visit them. How well do they stack up against Siemens and other competition?