Anatomy of a fog-to-cloud distributed recommendation system in airports

Airports are confusing environments even at the best of times. Recent advances in IoT have made it possible to develop real-time improved traveler assistance tools for mobile phones, which we describe in this paper. These tools will be particularly valuable for the elderly or disabled travelers, or people with other constraints that require assistance, but will be highly valuable also to the seasoned traveler. The tool covers the essential path through the airport onto the flight, but also allows the traveler to fill their waiting time by discovering the facilities of the airport, aided by a recommender system using machinelearning.
At the same time the system provides the airport with anonymized user “heat maps” which can highlight congestion and other aggregated data to highlight situations that require intervention, such as emergencies. Initially targeting Android, the app makes use of the fog-to-cloud platform developed by the Horizon2020-funded mF2C project.