Design and construction of an automated baggage sorting system

Baggage sorting is one of the major requirements for rapid processing in an airport. For larger airport automated system is must to match with the dynamic world. But there are many small to medium size airports handling between 1.5 and 6 million passengers a year, still haven´t automated. For many of these airports, there are still big gains to be made - in cost, time, efficiency and sorting quality - by introducing automated sorting system. The problem for many of those airports is finding the right systems to do the job. Because in many cases, solutions are designed primarily for the larger airports where much of the automation market is to be found are not cost effective for lower volume environments, and often those system cannot be accommodated within the space constraints of smaller terminal buildings. In the present project, an automated baggage handling and sorting system has been designed using microcontroller so that it could be cheaply implemented on a small size terminal with a low cost. A small scale model of the project has also been constructed. The sorting system is based on bar code reading and tracking of the baggage in a terminal. The baggages are then diverted to their destined terminal using a gate control system. The model can also be used in any packaging and distribution system.