Aena Ventures, Aena's open innovation program, today held the Demo Day of its second edition at Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport. More than 510 proposals have been received from 42 countries in this acceleration program, reflecting the attractiveness and international relevance of the program.
During the Demo Day, which was held at the headquarters of Aena Ventures in Barcelona, the results of the pilot projects of the five winning startups offering solutions to the different challenges proposed were presented. Once the evaluation of the proposals from each of the startups has been completed, the successful pilots will be able to opt for a contract with Aena of up to 2 million euros, to deploy the complete project across the company's entire structure.
The pilots developed have proven their viability in airport environments, providing Aena with valuable data and viable solutions for large-scale implementation:
• StressFreeCarRental, winner of the Airport Destination challenge, has developed a car rental platform accessible through the Aena Travel website, which allows users to rent vehicles in any international destination outside Spain in a simple way and from a single website.
• Danish Copenhagen Optimization, winner of the Airport Data Driven challenge, has implemented MySlot, a virtual queuing service that offers passengers a quick and efficient passage through the security checkpoint, based on a prior reservation. They have also deployed their predictive models for passenger presentation curves at checkpoint.
• The winner of the Airport Efficiency challenge, the Norwegian BagID, has developed a solution based on electronic tags that allows baggage check-in from home, the generation of an electronic tag and baggage tracking with Bluetooth and RFID technologies.
• The Spanish representative, DeuSens, winner of the Virtual Airport challenge, has designed an immersive virtual reality experience for the training of firefighter teams, thus improving the training and evaluation of personnel.
• And finally, the Dutch company Hovyu, winner of the Greener Airport challenge, has implemented an innovative technology for the capture of CO2 in the natural gas boilers of the Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport, evaluating the technical and economic viability of the technology.