During the T-Systems Symposium 2013, Airbus has introduced Bag2Go an intelligent suitcase which can travel completely independently and transported to the destination without the owner. Travelers Airbus want to allow more flexibility and mobility by arriving the target free of luggage by plane, ship, train, car, bike or by foot. The Bag2Go service relies on the business cloud infrastructure of T-Systems.

Background of Bag2Go

A Bag2Go is self-weighing, self-labeling, self-travelling, self-tracing and has features of a continuous tracking. In addition, according to Airbus, it consistently adhere with all common standards today, so that the current infrastructure at airports must not be changed. Using a smartphone app the status and whereabouts can constantly be monitored.

Airbus plans to cooperate with different transport services (eg DHL). So, for example, the traveler can fly by plane to the destination, but his baggage arrive by land, ship or another aircraft to the target. Package services or door-to-door luggage transportation services to provide transportation of luggage to any destination in inland or abroad in a hotel or cruise booking.

A follow-up is generally convenient, but makes only sense if one can also intervene in the action. For this purpose, Airbus relies on a GPS tracking in conjunction with a transport service provider, such as transportation / logistics or the airline.

Motivation of Airbus

Airbus has obviously developed the concept Bag2Go not without self-interest. The point is to make the first steps for the aircraft of the future. This means that Airbus is building sustainable and ultra-light aircrafts, for which is as little weight as possible required. At the same time, fuel consumption is significantly decreasing. To remove the heavy luggage from the plane is the key component. The separation of passenger and baggage streams to enable Airbus and the entire industry to control the carriage of baggage proactively and open up completely new business opportunities.

According to Airbus, the containerization of luggage is continuously gaining in importance as more and more people will take a door-to-door transport in and claim their baggage up to three days prior to departure or use a baggage kiosk. For this reason, Airbus will try to establish fully networked transport capsules as a standard.

Interesting approach – but not for everyone

Airbus faces with his concept less technical but more legal problems. Means a traveler and his luggage need to fly together. A suitcase can fly afterwards the passenger, but not ahead. In addition, business executives challenged the three days in advance luggage check-in during the presentation, because they pack their suitcase itself up to one hour before the flight. A few more conversations after the presentation confirmed the general opinion and attitudes of business travelers on the subject.

Nevertheless, Bag2Go is an interesting concept we will see soon in reality. At the same time it is a great use case for the Internet of Things. Bag2Go forms an analogous to the architecture of the Internet routing, where a single IP packet, normally associated with a complete data stream, can also take different paths to the goal.

Business Transformation in the age of collaboration and The Internet of Things

Cisco sees its future as an enabler for the Internet of Everything (IoE). The difference to the today frequenty discussed Internet of Things (IoT) is in the amount of connected objects. Where IoT is connecting people with machines and machines with machines, IoE is on people, processes, data and things. This means there is a need for more connectivity. For this purpose, Cisco sees about 50 billionen smart objects in 2020 worldwide which are connected with each other. Here fog computing should help in the future what I’ve already introduced and analyzed.

Ready for Hybrid Cloud with T-Systems DSI vCloud = VMware vCloud Datacenter Services

A VMware study shows that 37 percent of leading european IT decision makers suppose not captured costs for used cloud services within their enterprise. In addition, 58 percent of european knowledge workers would use not approved cloud services. VMware sees a solution in IT-as-a-Service. Here IT departments position themselves as a competitor to external service provider. VMware also notes that historically arised IT silos like storage, network, server, Windows, Unix and Linux are the biggest challenges for IT-as-a-Service. Here the software-defined datacenter which is based on the components virtual server, software-defined network and software-defined storage should help. All together, this builds the foundation to migrate workloads on demand to a certified vCloud datacenter via a hybrid cloud.

Bag2Go: The modern suitcase on a lonely travel

With its Bag2Go, an intelligent bag, Airbus will separate people from their luggage. This means that a bag can have another route to the destination as the traveller itself. Therefore the bag offers various characterstics: self-weighing, self-labeling, self-travelling. Even the permanent tracking of the bag and its status is possible. Airbus promises that no changes are need to be made to the existing infrastructure of an airport. Airbus future goal is to establish fully interlinked transport capsules as a standard. An Internet of Things use case. Bag2Go uses the infrastructure of the T-Systems business cloud.