Aeroporti Di Roma selects Outsight's LiDAR Solution

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is ADR's 'Runway to the Future' program?

  Aeroporti di Roma's 'Runway to the Future' is a competitive innovation program that solicits technology proposals from companies worldwide and selects a small cohort to pilot their solutions at Rome Fiumicino Leonardo da Vinci Airport. The selection process is highly competitive: the program received 716 proposals in the round that included Outsight. Selected companies get to demonstrate their technology in a live airport environment that handles over 40 million passengers annually, giving them access to one of Europe's most complex operational testbeds. Outsight was chosen to deploy its Motional Digital Twin technology at the airport, bringing infrastructure-based 3D LiDAR perception to one of Italy's busiest transport hubs.

• What makes Rome Fiumicino a useful testbed for passenger flow technology?

  Fiumicino is often compared to a small city in terms of its operational complexity: multiple terminals, a large ground transportation interchange, and consistent high passenger volumes. It holds a 5-Star Skytrax rating and the Airports Council International title of Best Airport in Europe for airports exceeding 40 million annual passengers. That combination of scale, terminal diversity, and recognized operational excellence makes it a demanding proving ground, where a passenger flow system that performs well is credible for deployment at comparably complex hubs elsewhere. Aeroporti di Roma selected Outsight through its "Runway to the Future" innovation program, deploying LiDAR-based infrastructure sensing to build a real-time picture of how passengers and vehicles move through the site, precisely the conditions needed to validate technology intended for the world's busiest airports.

• How does LiDAR-based passenger flow monitoring improve airport operational efficiency?

  LiDAR sensors mounted in airport infrastructure produce a continuous, real-time 3D picture of where passengers are, how fast they move, where queues form, and where bottlenecks develop. Because the data is available in under 50 milliseconds end-to-end, operations teams can reallocate staff or open additional lanes before a bottleneck reaches critical length. Outsight applies this approach at Rome Fiumicino Leonardo da Vinci Airport through its SHIFT platform, which builds a Motional Digital Twin of passenger movement across the terminal without capturing faces or biometric data. Unlike camera-based systems, LiDAR works in any lighting condition and captures depth directly, so occupancy counts and queue-length measurements are geometry-based rather than inferred from 2D images.

• Does LiDAR passenger tracking at airports comply with GDPR and Italian data protection rules?

  LiDAR sensors capture shape, position, and motion using laser pulses. They do not record pixel images, faces, or biometric data. Because no personal information is ever captured, there is nothing to anonymize after the fact: the system is anonymous by design rather than by configuration. Outsight's infrastructure-based approach at Rome Fiumicino operates on exactly this principle, with the SHIFT platform processing 3D point clouds that contain no facial or biometric identifiers at any stage of the pipeline. This structural property satisfies GDPR and equivalent national data protection frameworks without requiring airport operators to implement additional anonymization pipelines or obtain special consent for biometric processing.

• How competitive is the LiDAR spatial intelligence market for airports?

  The selection pressure visible in programs like ADR's "Runway to the Future" reflects broader market dynamics: airport operators are actively evaluating multiple vendors, and proposal volumes in the hundreds are now common for major innovation tenders. Outsight has been recognized seven times by Gartner as a category-defining emerging leader in Spatial Computing and Digital Twins, and holds certifications including ISO 27001, SOC 2, and TISAX. Compatible sensor coverage across 210+ LiDAR models from different manufacturers is increasingly treated as a baseline requirement, because airports want hardware flexibility rather than lock-in to a single sensor vendor. Outsight's SHIFT platform addresses this directly through native multi-vendor LiDAR compatibility, a factor that has contributed to deployments at major hubs including Rome Fiumicino, Dallas Fort Worth, Paris-Charles de Gaulle, and Bordeaux Airport.

• Can the same LiDAR infrastructure used for passenger flow monitoring also support airport security applications?

  Yes. The same fixed LiDAR sensors that track passenger density and queue lengths can simultaneously feed perimeter intrusion detection, unauthorized-access alerts, and loitering detection pipelines. Because the spatial data is structured (each tracked entity carries a position, classification, and behavior label), different analytics modules consume the same underlying stream for different purposes. This is the architecture Outsight deployed at Rome Fiumicino as part of Aeroporti di Roma's innovation program: the SHIFT platform ingests a shared sensor network and routes the same 3D data stream to both operational flow analytics and security event detection. Airports with both mandates therefore avoid deploying redundant hardware for each function, reducing infrastructure cost while keeping all applications synchronized to a single source of truth.