TITAN – a smart layer upon Airport CDM
On 17/08/2011, in TITAN, by balazs
Not so long ago, a daring fellow named Orville Wright took off from a hazy field in North Carolina with his „homebuilt” airplane. He flew an impressive distance of 39 meters, then landed. That day, the Wright Flyer made four take-offs: the Wright brothers intended to take full advantage of the good weather on their day off.
108 years later, the distances flown in public air transport grew a bit longer, but the overall target of getting the most out of the possibilities hasn’t changed. In the last decades the engineering people of the industry unquestionably did a good job: the equipment is capable of running nearly 24/7. We have got instruments that can land an airplane without any intervention of the flight crew, airport opening hours are driven by the traffic much more than by the weather, moreover, the reliability of ground and in-flight systems is increasing as quickly as their maintenance period does.
There are only two factors of the equation that have remained – and will always remain – constant, and these become the ultimate limits of air transportation capacity. These are the physical space available and the loadability of the human mind.
Space, the first constraint, cannot be outflanked, since there are only two states of a given runway, airport gate or piece of airspace in a given moment: occupied or free. However, along with the evolution of information technology, computers are continuously extending the capacity of the human brain, at least on the level of data storage and organization. In the pre-computerized era, decision making required the talent of complementing the data available with good estimations of the missing information, the aim of IT solutions is to make all relevant information available to get rid of the need for this talent.
From the late 70’s computational data management started to gain growing influence in different fields of airline and airport management. This resulted in discrete, standalone systems that were – if at all – loosely interconnected. The responsible people of the different fields of operation could not complain anymore regarding the lack of data primarily needed for decision making. But regardless of the IT efforts, the delay statistics remained proportional to nothing else but the level of traffic at the best run and equipped airports just as well as at the others without the freshest IT infrastructure.
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Enterprise Architecture and service orientation – what is this?
On 03/11/2009, in Buzzwords explained, by steve
Few abbreviations connected with the future air traffic management system have given rise to so many questions and misunderstandings as EA (Enterprise Architecture) and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). In the United States both concepts are part and parcel of air traffic management system development since the marching orders were given by the Federal Government. In Europe, however, it was only during the SESAR development phase that EA and SOA were first introduced into the ATM context and the reception was at first mixed.
To-day there is probably no doubt any more that EA and SOA are the way to go but the fact remains: to many in the air traffic management family the exact meaning of both remains a puzzle.
Let’s try to set out the pieces and see what picture emerges.
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BluePower CDM Toolbox– The perfect tool for airport Collaborative Decision Making
On 31/10/2009, in CDM, by steve
Originally Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) was a simple concept indeed. Realizing that a lot of problems in air traffic management came from the simple fact that many of the partners simply did not talk to each other, it was easy to reach the conclusion: make them work together, stop decisions being made in isolation, improve decisions by making them the result of a collaborative endeavor.
It was not easy at first and people invented all kinds of reasons for not doing it… most of the reasons given were simply not valid. We will be bringing you a short history of CDM later and you will see why I am saying this. To a large extent thanks to a small group of enthusiasts (the famous original CDM group in the US), more and more airlines and airports realized that working together was far more beneficial than hiding behind ill-defined concepts of commercial sensitivities.
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2009 Airline IT Trends Survey now available
On 25/10/2009, in Just to let you know..., by steve
The 2009 edition of the Airline IT Trends Survey,
co-sponsored by Airline Business and SITA, is now available.
You can purchase the full results on CD by sending an email.
To download the very comprehensive Executive Summary, click here.
New directions for Airport Collaborative Decision Making (CDM)
On 07/10/2009, in CDM, by steve
What exactly is CDM?
Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) is not a new concept. It is being practiced to a certain degree both in the US and in Europe, focus being on en-route in the former and airports in the latter. Mature as the concept may be, surprisingly we still see experts who seem to believe that CDM is little more than a few wise men sitting together and deciding things for the benefit of the community… Little wonder that they see a role for CDM that is strictly limited to the strategic planning phases. They seem to hang on to this view even in the face of actual CDM implementations at some airports (e.g. Munich) which are anything but limited to the strategic phase. So, what is CDM?
The concept of CDM is very simple. Decisions on all levels must be made not in isolation but based on a shared, common view of the state of the ATM network with full awareness of the consequences of the decisions on every aspect of the operation. Collaborative in this context does not necessarily imply people sitting together or working together remotely. A single person can also make a collaborative decision if the decision is based on the shared information provided by the partners and if it takes into account the impact of the decision on those partners and the ATM network as a whole.
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Net-centric air traffic management system explained
On 11/08/2009, in Buzzwords explained, by steve
Net-centric, in its most common definition, refers to “participation as a part of a continuously evolving, complex community of people, devices, information and services interconnected by a communications network to optimise resource management and provide superior information on events and conditions needed to empower decision makers.” It will be clear from the definition that “net-centric” does not refer to a network as such. It is a term that covers all elements constituting the environment referred to as “net-centric”.
Exchanges between members of the community are based not on cumbersome individual interfaces and point to point connections but a flexible network paradigm that is never a hindrance to the evolution of the net-centric community. Net-centricity promotes a “many-to-many” exchange of data, enabling a multiplicity of users and applications to make use of the same data which in itself extends way beyond the traditional, predefined and package oriented data set while still being standardised sufficiently to ensure global interoperability. The aim of a net-centric system is to make all data visible, available and usable, when needed and where needed, to accelerate and improve the decision making process.
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