Development of Point-of-Sale system for Airlines

Client and Business Goals:

Back days in 2019, FlightPos was established by Mike Boote and Bruce Mundin. FlightPos aim was to create a set of services which simplify in-flight retail, analysis and onboard operations in a way that any air flight company can integrate the system easily and start getting benefits from it right away.

Product Description:

Flightpos In-flight retail solution is a set of software services both in-flight and on-ground which purpose is to track stock levels, manage product catalogue, provide onboard payment solution via web or via pin entry devices (PED). One of the cherry’s on top is to provide sales analytics so flight company management can detect trends and viable insights.

Applied Technologies:

Java, AWS Lambda, AWS ECS, AWS S3, Cloudformation, Serverless framework, MySql, NodeJs, Docker, Websockets, Ionic Framework

Project Highlights:

• Inventory and products catalogue management 
• Data lake solution for sales analysis
• Custom crew device mobile application

Inventory and products catalogue management

There is a big gap between having the list of products (a catalogue) and being able to sell them onboard. Broscorp created a set of cloud-deployed serverless applications, and microservices deployed on aircraft hardware that manages automates and control the flow of data from the beginning up to the moment when the cup of coffee is sold and served to the passenger.  If simplified the process is following. First, the data arrives from the flight company in multiple formats and there is a custom ETL that processes, verifies and stores the product catalogue. Then before the take-off, a set of services which are running on board connects to ground services and fetches the latest product catalogue. During the flight, services keep track of orders and control the inventory. When the flight is over all the data is uploaded to the ground services for further processing and analysis.

Data lake solution for sales analysis

In-flight retail solution produces a lot of data. It would be not efficient to not make use of this data. Cause it can be a source of viable insights for the management. Broscorp has created a custom ETL solution that collects sales data and stores it in DataLake. This solution stores the data which can be analysed to extract following metrics like:

1. Most popular products depending on flight route
2. Most popular products depending on season, day time, etc.
3. Analyze the price elasticity

The solution was built as a set of AWS Lambdas populating the Data lake’s so-called “Swamp” area, then an AWS Glue Spark job is processing the data putting it into the so-called “Lake” area and eventually, AWS Athena + AWS Quicksight is used to build insightful dashboards.

Custom crew device mobile application

Broscorp has to create a crew device mobile application which can later be installed on iOS and Android devices and keep track of orders, get notifications when a new order arrives and manage the payments. We’ve created an Ionic-based application to avoid creating separate native applications for both platforms and reuse a lot of Angular experience we have internally. So the resulting mobile application:

• Uses WebSockets to get instant notifications about new orders
• Authorize and register crew devices with ground services
• Manages the orders
• Automatically connects to aircraft wifi
• Manages the payment through the payment SDK