Korea Airports Corp. Adopts Altibase Data Management with IoT for Airport Traffic Control

April 1, 2019

Courtney E. Howard

KAC officials are upgrading from legacy database management systems (DBMS), which fail to meet current and future requirements.

Korea Airports Corp. (KAC) officials in Seoul, South Korea, needed a big data management platform harnessing Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to help increase airport flow efficiency and passenger throughput at the 14 airports KAC manages in Korea. They have ended their extensive search for a solution, adopting the Altibase enterprise-grade, open-source database for airport traffic control from Altibase Corp. in Seoul, South Korea, and New York.

KAC officials – responsible for the construction, management, and operation of airports and air traffic management at 14 airports in Korea – have selected Altibase big data platform with IoT capabilities to improve the efficacy of collecting and analyzing data, including passenger and airport flow.

KAC is inundated with a large amount of data influx from its 14 airports, and legacy DBMS did not meet the throughput requirement. Legacy systems could not meet the minimum of 100,000 transactions per second, storing and manipulating formal data; as a result, the whole system often fell into arrears.

“Even mere seconds of database downtime cannot be tolerated with KAC, which could lead to fatal casualties, not to mention lost revenues and reputation,” officials say. “Consequently, an extremely high level of stability is required of its DBMS.”

The new DBMS also had to be compatible and interoperable with other core systems of Hadoop and the platform.

KAC officials chose Altibase over Oracle based on Altibase’s 19 years of accumulated know-how and experience in storage and analysis of big data and Altibase’s in-memory capabilities, which enable high throughput and low latency, particularly high processing performance of big data.

Additional requirements met by Altibase, officials say, include: a high-performance user interface/user experience (UI/UX) and KAC’s zero tolerance of database downtime.

Armed with Altibase, KAC is now able to collect and analyze big data – including flight status and passenger flow – in real time to anticipate airport congestion, improve passenger convenience, and more efficiently operate airport resources. With cooperation from mobile service providers, KAC has added new passenger services by providing the shortest routes from their departing points to their airports to avoid heavy traffic.

Altibase is now open source after nearly 20 years as a closed-source database.

Courtney E. Howard is editorial director and content strategist at SAE International. Contact her by e-mail at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .