Case Study: Heathrow achieves tenfold reduction in underground service strikes with Trimble RFID and geospatial solutions

How Europe’s busiest airport keeps an eye on invisible assets

Heathrow Airport, one of the world’s busiest and most compact airfields, faces a complex underground challenge: some 45,000 manholes, thousands of miles of pipes and cables, 13 different utilities and roughly 1,200 excavations underway at any time. This dense, hidden infrastructure made locating specific assets risky, time-consuming and liable to costly service strikes and operational delays.

Heathrow implemented geospatial mapping combined with RFID-tagged assets and Trimble handheld readers, linking tag data to maintenance workflows (including Bluetooth-enabled torque verification). The system lets crews quickly identify and record assets, speeds pit location and correct installation, feeds information into the maintenance database, and has driven service strikes down from about 1.8% in 2004 to 0.2% in 2013 while achieving ~74% of known infrastructure mapped within 0.5 m.

Heathrow

Andy Rhoades

Head of Service Protection