The transportation industry is key to social and economic development since it facilitates cross-national movement. Freight transportation services keep crucial products like food and medical supplies, as well as a wide range of resources, available to businesses and customers. Not only does the transportation industry contribute considerably to economic growth and job creation, but it also helps to eliminate supply shortages. To combat the spread of COVID-19, many countries have implemented restrictions on internal transit and/or limited border crossings for freight transport services. The resulting drop in commerce and supply chain disruptions impacts all countries, but landlocked underdeveloped countries may be particul3arly vulnerable. The transport industry has thus been forced to come up with innovations in response to the pandemic to facilitate easy and smooth operations and at the same time curb the spread of the virus.
Although the transition to a contactless passenger experience in the aviation industry has been underway for some time, the pandemic has accelerated the introduction of contactless technology to reduce the spread of the virus and interaction between travelers and workers. Several airlines and airports have quickly adopted contactless technologies. Etihad, for example, was the first airline to test new contactless self-service technology in April. Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL) and AirAsia followed suit, introducing an end-to-end contactless airport experience in May (Baig, Hall, Jenkins, Lamarre & McCarthy, 2020). The technology is projected to be utilized more widely throughout the travel, from check-in and security processes to how travelers pay for extra services at the airport (Baig et al., 2020). Furthermore, the technology will be used on how passengers aboard the plane interact with in-flight entertainment systems on board.
Digital health passports are one developing technology created in response to the epidemic. Several projects are presently ongoing throughout the world to create and deploy digital health passports. The CommonPass initiative, launched in October last year as a collaboration between the Commons Project, the World Economic Forum, and a broad coalition of public and business partners, intends to standardize the verification of test findings and immunization records (Krakat, 2020). To utilize CommonPass, travelers must first complete a COVID-19 exam at an authorized lab and then submit the results to their mobile phone. Next, they fill out any further health screening questionnaires that the target country requires. The solution has been tested on United’s London–New York flights and will shortly be tested on Lufthansa and Virgin Atlantic aircraft.
The epidemic has placed a high focus on biometrics as a must-have technology, with COVID-19 bolstering the concept of seamless travel. The number of airlines and airports that have implemented the technology has increased significantly in the last few years. Recently, Star Alliance announced the launch of a new interoperable biometric identity and identification platform for screening passengers, which was available in November 2020 at Munich and Frankfurt airports for select Lufthansa Group customers (Serrano & Kazda, 2020). Furthermore, Spirit Airlines used biometric check-in at US airports to eliminate face-to-face interaction between airline workers and customers, while Emirates debuted an integrated biometric route at Dubai International Airport.
One of the biggest concerns about the deployment of face recognition technology during the epidemic has been whether the system might determine the identities of travelers wearing masks. Indeed, several providers have been trying to improve their biometric systems so that travelers can pass through biometrics checks without removing their masks. NEC is one such company that teamed up with Star Alliance on its most recent biometrics program. The Chief Executive Officer of NEC Corporation of America, emphasized at the recent Biometrics Summit that allowing mask-wearing was an absolute prerequisite before the project could be launched. “The technology in the Star Alliance biometrics service has been taught to overcome this mask issue with accuracies of up to 98 percent,” he said (Imaoka et al., 2021). However, the implementation of new and developing technologies, like as biometrics and digital health passports, poses several issues, and securing customer data is one of the most important tasks for airlines, airports, and their partners (Kasper Frederiksen, 2021). The usage of sensitive personal information is at the heart of such solutions, and it is critical to address privacy concerns early in the development process before large-scale deployment.
While warehousing is sometimes overlooked outside of the logistics business, it is one of the foundations that keeps the industry afloat. Strong storage is among the key components of a good logistic ecosystem. To ensure faultless warehouse management, logistics companies have begun automating nearly every component to free up human resources for more vital, demanding tasks. Although there was technological integration in warehouses before the pandemic, 2021 has proven to be the year of breakthroughs. To save time and money, logistics platforms have incorporated robotic order picking and even packing, and today warehouse management services have been supplemented for efficient end-to-end shipping services.
Because of the pandemic’s pervasive fear of physical touch with other people, customers are increasingly choosing contactless services for practically every transaction they make. This includes package lockers, self-driving delivery robots, and in-app signing software. Fixed presentation scanners have been adopted by logistics facilities so that operators do not have to handle objects like handheld scanners (Klein et al 2022). Such contactless services have gained so much popularity that they are likely to become industry standards.
References
Baig, A., Hall, B., Jenkins, P., Lamarre, E., & McCarthy, B. (2020). The COVID-19 recovery will be digital: A plan for the first 90 days. McKinsey Digital, 14.
Imaoka, H., Hashimoto, H., Takahashi, K., Ebihara, A. F., Liu, J., Hayasaka, A.,… & Sakurai, K. (2021). The future of biometrics technology: from face recognition to related applications. APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing, 10.
Kasper Frederiksen, T. (2021). A Holistic Approach to Enhanced Security and Privacy in Digital Health Passports. arXiv e-prints, arXiv-2105.
Krakat, M. B. (2020). Health Passports Are Coming-What Does That Mean for Investment Migration? Investment Migration Insider.
Klein, M., Gutowska, E., & Gutowski, P. (2022). innovations in the t&l (transport and logistics) sector during the covid-19 pandemic in Sweden, Germany, and Poland. Sustainability, 14(6), 3323.
Serrano, F., & Kazda, A. (2020). The future of airports posts COVID-19. Journal of Air Transport Management, 89, 101900.