While most American tech firms are shutting down for Christmas, it’s business as usual in China, where Alibaba Cloud, the public cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., is unveiling new artificial intelligence technology aimed at curbing delays in Beijing’s international airport.

Alibaba lifted the lid off its ET Aviation Brain at the Beijing Computing Conference on Wednesday. ET Aviation Brain is an AI-based technology that’s designed to increase efficiency at airports by reducing “on the ground logjams.” The system, debuting at Beijing Capital International Airport, works by digitally assigning planes to aprons, which are parking spaces for aircraft.

The system is part of Alibaba’s “ET Brain” project, which is an AI program that encompasses other smart systems such as Alibaba’s City Brain, Environment Brain, Industrial Brain and Medical Brain. Each of these technologies are powered by Alibaba’s Apsara Aliware platform as a service.

Alibaba said ET Brain would be fully implemented at Beijing’s airport by the end of next month. Frustrated travelers will surely appreciate any efforts to reduce delays at BCIA, which has been ranked as the second-busiest airport in the world for seven years straight in terms of passenger numbers, according to the Airports International Council.

Although BCIA can handle 96 million passengers a year at the last count, it doesn’t always handle them very well. The AIC said it’s one of the worst airports in the world when it comes to delayed landings and takeoffs, with planes often asked to keep circling for lack of aprons for parked aircraft. The airport is equipped with only 300 aprons, yet it has to accommodate around 1,700 flights per day. This congestion means that more than 20,000 passengers per day are forced to ride on ground transport for an average of 15 minutes to reach their aircraft, increasing waiting times and adding to passenger frustration.

Alibaba Cloud reckons its ET Brain can eliminate most of these delays. The company claimed its technology will increase the airport’s utilization of aprons by 10 percent, while shortening daily apron assignment processes from between two and three hours to just 50 seconds. What this means is that aircraft pilots will automatically be directed to a place where they can park, instead of waiting for a human operator to assign them a space.

ET Aviation Brain does this because it uses machine learning to understand everything about the airport’s processes, including the various aircraft models, takeoff and landing schedules, apron locations, proximity between the taxiway and runway, and the capacities of the airport’s shuttle buses. ET Aviation Brain then crunches that data to come up with the most optimized operating strategy taking into account all of the scheduled flights for each day.

“We are very pleased to see that ET Aviation Brain, powered by Alibaba Cloud’s large-scale computing engine Apsara and data intelligence capabilities, is being adopted by BCIA to digitalize its operations,” said Dr. Min Wanli (pictured), chief scientist of machine intelligence at Alibaba Cloud. “ET Aviation Brain embodies infrastructure and solutions for aviation digitalization in China, all in the cloud. We look forward to wider application of the technology and to developing further vertical solutions for other industries.”

Alibaba Cloud’s ET Aviation Brain will also be used to help with other functions at the airport, including route planning for airline carriers and ground-staff assignments.

Alibaba’s Min Wanli appeared as a guest on SiliconANGLE’s mobile TV studio show theCUBE during the The Computing Conference in Hangzhou, China, in October, where he spoke at length about the company’s plans for its ET Brain machine learning technology:

Image: Alibaba Cloud