The Role and Influence of Industry 4.0. in Airport Operations in the Context of COVID-19

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, aviation at the global level is currently facing one of the biggest challenges in its sustainability. The entire philosophy related to airport operations and passenger processing changes due to the fast-spreading nature of this disease. The “new normal” in the aviation sector, primarily at the airport, will provide the passenger a different quality level of service in comparison to what we used to have until now. Following World Health Organization measures, especially those related to social distances, the future focus will be on the implementation of fully automated self-service passenger traffic flows that will change the airport passenger traffic flows’ processing structure. This paper shows current technologies and processes and how this “new normal” will change philosophy related to Industry 4.0 at the airport passenger operations, functionality, and human resource (HR) planning and optimizations.