In airports from Paris‑Charles de Gaulle to Lyon-Saint-Exupéry, Actemium’s experts are working to provide preventive and corrective maintenance for the baggage-sorting systems.
The management and maintenance of baggage sorting is an area of expertise that Actemium, the VINCI Energies industry brand, has been developing over many years. Since 2012, Actemium Maintenance Aéroportuaire Paris has been providing preventive and corrective maintenance for baggage-sorting systems in Terminals 2E and 2F at Paris‑Charles de Gaulle Airport.
This contract was the continuation of a long collaboration between ADP and Cegelec (purchased by VINCI Energies in 2010), which began in 2000 when they worked alongside SIemens to co-design the airport’s baggage-sorting system. It is currently managed by an ad hoc partnership between Actemium Maintenance Aéroportuaire Paris and Siemens, under a 15-year agreement due to conclude in 2027.
“There are various VINCI Energies business units involved in airport maintenance,” explains Arounan Koné, Business Unit Manager at Actemium Maintenance Aéroportuaire Paris. “They include Actemium Maintenance Airports Logistics, which works with logistics customers in airport environments and with regional airports (Lyon, Corsica); Actemium Paris Airport, which handles automation; and TG Concept, a VINCI Energies business unit we work with on responding to calls for tender from ADP requiring an integrator of baggage-sorting machinery, such as those for Terminal 2C and Terminal 2A.”
Specific constraints
The unique features of the airport environment have required Actemium to juggle a number of constraints over the past 13 years in the performance of its mission. “We have to bear in mind the complexity of baggage-sorting systems, which require advanced technical expertise for their maintenance,” says Arounan Koné. “This includes the use of CMMS (computerised maintenance management system) software such as CARL Source.” He also raises the issue of compliance with safety and security standards, “which require regular upgrades and rigorous inspections. This also means that personnel working airside have to undergo character and background checks to get the permits they need to move around the airport.”
Commitment and responsiveness
But the Actemium teams also face numerous other challenges. In organisational terms, rapid-response teams must be available to perform maintenance quickly in order to minimise stoppages, since the baggage-sorting systems operate virtually continuously (18 hours out of 24) and are essential to keeping airport operations running smoothly.
“The complexity of baggage-sorting systems demands advanced technical expertise for their maintenance.”
Arounan Koné continues: “Coordination between the different teams and the management of spare parts are also essential to providing prompt and effective maintenance. We have therefore appointed a recruitment officer to address the shortages we face in certain skill sets.” In total, 78 Actemium employees are working on this contract, working in three eight-hour shifts, 365 days a year. They boast an extremely diverse range of skill sets, from maintenance technicians to warehouse managers, automation experts and electricians.
Advanced maintenance
The challenge is also considerable from a technical standpoint, requiring for example “Preventive maintenance strategies to avoid unexpected breakdowns, using IoT technologies to monitor equipment in real time”.
The predictive maintenance solution Naomi, designed by VINCI Energies, allows monitoring of all the baggage-sorting machines in real time and tracks wear and tear to the equipment (see sub-article). “The dashboard provided by our data scientist processes all the CMMS data from all our customers centrally,” says Arounan Koné. “This enables us to compare the machines’ performance between different sites. We can also predict our requirements for spare parts based on physical stocks and average consumption in previous years.”
At ADP, predictive maintenance goes by the name of Naomi
Since February 2023, one of the two baggage-sorting machines in Terminal 2F at Paris‑Charles de Gaulle Airport has been equipped with a predictive maintenance solution known as Naomi.
“Developed entirely in-house by VINCI Energies, this solution combines a range of sensors with custom-designed software and a secure cloud platform,” explains Tuan Nguyen, Data Scientist at Actemium Maintenance Aéroportuaire Paris. “This allows real-time monitoring of the baggage-sorting machines in operation, using massive-scale data analysis and artificial intelligence to preventively detect the early warning signs of a failure and notify our operational teams of any anomalies found.”
Naomi works with all the technologies from the different suppliers of sorting equipment, enabling maintenance teams to intervene and repair or replace equipment at the ideal moment to avoid prolonged stoppages. “We have proved the solution’s reliability, with 93% of alerts correctly detecting the early warning signs of equipment deterioration,” says Tuan Nguyen. To ensure security, data is end-to-end encrypted, and the cloud storage, hosted on Safe Place servers operated by Axians – the VINCI Energies ICT brand – is designed to eliminate any intrusion risk.
Following the success of this installation, ADP asked for Naomi to be deployed on the four sorting machines covered under the Actemium maintenance contract for Terminals 2E and 2F.
04/17/2025
