Application of FRIEND® in Aviation
According to the EUROCONTROL's reports, the European air traffic management (ATM) system currently handles around 26,000 flights daily. Forecasts indicate air traffic levels are likely to double by 2020. Moreover, European ATM costs an additional 2–3 billion € every year, compared to other similar systems in the world.
| PROBLEM | Solutions with FRIEND® | BENEFIT |
|---|---|---|
| Non-interoperable IT systems | Advanced implementation of Virtual Information Pool | All stakeholders can keep their existing databases (including civil and military) |
| Increasing traffic | Highly scalable object database management system | Adherence to safety rules and expected time |
| Implementation of door-to-door philosophy | Improved data security for every stakeholder | Cooperation of stakeholders possible while data stays secure |
| Aviation routes and time management | Shorter routes through unified data | Significant fuel savings |
| Out-of-date software because of high security requirements | Software adaptability | Significant savings in migration costs of every stakeholder |
Attempting to accommodate the increasing air traffic flows, while cutting costs and improving its performance, the Single European Sky program (SES) has been launched, driving to reform the architecture of European air traffic management. Its technological foundation, the SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) programme will give Europe a high-performance air traffic control infrastructure which will enable safe and environment friendly development of air transport.
In the spirit of the ambitious requirements of the SESAR, SC-N is elaborating a multiple step process of developing tools for System Wide Information Management (SWIM) in the time frame of a four year project.
Our first goal is to provide a generic database solution, accommodating the need to store increasingly complex data, simultaneously providing extreme performance. FRIEND® ODBMS is a database allowing easy integration with information systems. In cases of complex and highly decentralized stored data, FRIEND® ODBMS provides high performance through its architecture. The extension mechanism of FRIEND® ODBMS offers great ability to evolve the code to accommodate future requirements and retrieve information with high performance. FRIEND® ODBMS offers hooks for domain-specific extensions.
Consecutively, the project includes the development of an integration framework that provides a general coupling mechanism. Information integration will be achieved through the coupling mechanism, so that various kinds of systems can be connected to the Virtual Information Pool regardless of what data models or database management systems they are using. The Virtual Information Pool is providing a system wide information access platform spanning several views through one interface. Our goal is to provide a solution that will significantly increase flight planning through accurate and up-to-date information.
Complexity factors
- Real-time factor: create and analyse complex data created from streaming monitoring information in real-time (such as geographically distributed sources of weather conditions, airport conditions, airspace availability). Many real-time applications require storage of massive amounts of data, that subsequently must be processed and analysed to help model and simulate real world scenarios, feeding complex information models into decision support applications and even decision making applications.
- Highly networked, heterogeneous sources of data: specifically in aviation, data needed for the analysis and development of a flight route comes from highly distributed heterogeneous sources (meteo, historical data on previous plan flights, local runway conditions, restrictions in some blocks of the airspace, etc.). This requires a way to achieve concurrent, secure and coherent access to this information in order to calculate an efficient route.
- Security is of utter importance. Stakeholders must keep control over their data and preserve the autonomy of their systems. Data consumers do not need to know where the requested data is stored.
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