The PISTIS Athens Living Labs for Demonstrator Hub #1 brought together stakeholders from aviation, mobility, urban planning, public transport, weather services, and digital governance to validate how trusted data sharing can improve operational coordination and create new business value in Athens.
The first Athens Living Lab, held on 3 March 2026, focused on the Mobility and Urban Planning Ecosystem and attracted more than 50 participants from the mobility, urban planning, tourism, and IT sectors. The session showcased how PISTIS tools can support urban planning, mobility for citizens and visitors, and entrepreneurship linked to tourism and city services in Athens.
The second Athens Living Lab, held on 5 March 2026, provided a technical deep dive into the PISTIS platform architecture, aviation integration, dashboard visualisation, and the Living Lab Experimentation Factory. Participants were given hands-on access to test login, asset discovery, dataset preview, API endpoints, contract negotiation, and platform navigation in a sandbox environment designed for experimentation with aviation datasets. The workshop also aimed to validate technical requirements and gather direct feedback on customisation opportunities, data space connectors, analytics tools, and marketplace workflows.
The third Athens Living Lab, held on 26 March 2026, shifted the focus to the strategic and business value of the Greek Hub aviation use cases. The session examined how data spaces can transform airport digital operations through three concrete use cases: baggage handling management, transfer passenger management, and aircraft turnaround process optimisation.
The discussion around Use Case 1.1 showed how secure, real-time sharing of baggage timestamps, flight schedule updates, weather alerts, and force majeure notifications between Athens International Airport and Goldair can help detect irregularities earlier and reduce baggage delivery SLA violations. The living lab set out a target of a 5 percent reduction in baggage delivery SLA violations and positioned baggage handling as a practical example of moving from reactive handling of disruptions to proactive operational control.
For Use Case 1.2, participants explored how the exchange of transfer passenger numbers, connection type data, PTM messages, and flight delay status can support dynamic aircraft stand allocation and improve on-time performance. The discussion highlighted a concrete operational dilemma at airports: whether to hold a departing flight for delayed transfer passengers or depart on time and strand them, and showed how a shared real-time picture improves that decision. The session also linked these operational gains to airline performance, noting that every 1 percent improvement in on-time performance can increase airline net revenue by 0.6 percent.
For Use Case 1.3, the living lab demonstrated how integrating TOBT updates, turnaround sub-process data from AIA’s Airport Management System, Goldair operational inputs, and UBIMET weather services can create a unified live view of turnaround progress. Participants discussed how this can improve coordination across fuelling, catering, cleaning, boarding, baggage loading, and pushback, and reduce the impact of delays before they materialise. To frame the discussion, the session referred to external industry benchmarks on AI-supported turnaround coordination, which have reported improvements in ground delay reduction and overall operational efficiency at hub airports. These references were included to illustrate broader market potential and not as measured outcomes of the Demonstrator Hub #1 activities.
A major outcome of the third living lab was the move from technical validation to explicit business modelling. The workshop identified four monetisation pathways for the Greek Hub: subscription-based access to operational datasets, pay-per-use transactions for APIs and records, contract-based licensing for sensitive operational exchanges, and value-added analytics combining airport, transport, and weather data. Concrete examples included AIA providing Goldair with subscription access to baggage and schedule feeds, OAG charging per schedule query, UBIMET charging per weather API call, and analytics providers combining AIA, OASA, and UBIMET data to offer predictive turnaround and mobility insights.
The living lab discussions also clarified why data sharing must continue beyond the project. The Greek Hub partners identified complementary datasets, continuous model improvement, GDPR-compliant governance, auditability, and standardised APIs as essential conditions for scaling trusted data exchange in airport and urban mobility ecosystems. The platform was consistently framed not as a central repository, but as a federated environment in which each organisation retains control of its own data while enabling governed exchange with other stakeholders.
Feedback collected across the living labs confirmed that end-users contributed to co-creation, usability validation, platform adoption, and exploitation thinking. The living lab process helped participants understand how PISTIS can support new data-driven business models, improve operational workflows, and raise awareness of data exchange and monetisation practices. It also generated ideas for future product evolution and broader exploitation, including additional data products, stronger visualisation features, and new partnership opportunities linked to the Greek Hub ecosystem.
Overall, the Athens Living Labs showed that Demonstrator Hub #1 has progressed from concept validation to practical demonstration of secure data exchange, operational dashboards, and monetisation scenarios across aviation and urban mobility. The Greek Hub now provides a concrete example of how airports, ground handlers, public transport operators, city authorities, and data service providers can use PISTIS to turn fragmented data into coordinated action and long-term value creation.
