What sort of baggage handling system? Some fascinating stuff happening with some huge automated package singulating/sorting/stacking systems. Is the company Siemens? I know they have a finger in all of those industries.
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?