Final Project Report Document information Project Title Workstation, Service Interface Definition Project Number B.04.04 Project Manager DSNA Deliverable Name Final Project Report Deliverable ID D01 Edition 01.00.02 Template Version 03.00.04 Task contributors DFS, DSNA, ENAIRE, EUROCONTROL, NATS, ENAV, SKYGUIDE, INDRA, THALES, FREQUENTIS, LEONARDO Abstract The purpose of SESAR project B04.04 was to define a common Service Interface for the Controller Working Position based on clear and open industry standard interface. The project being a feasibility study, its goal was to assess the technical feasibility of the Virtual Centre concept promoting the remote provision of information from ATM Data Service Providers. The services have been designed using the SESAR Working Method on Services, and have then been assessed through 4 demonstrations each involving multiple CWPs and service providers.
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Final Project Report
Document information
Project Title Workstation, Service Interface Definition
The purpose of SESAR project B04.04 was to define a common Service Interface for the Controller Working Position based on clear and open industry standard interface. The project being a feasibility study, its goal was to assess the technical feasibility of the Virtual Centre concept promoting the remote provision of information from ATM Data Service Providers. The services have been designed using the SESAR Working Method on Services, and have then been assessed through 4 demonstrations each involving multiple CWPs and service providers.
Project Number B.04.04 Edition 01.00.02 D01- Final Project Report
In the context of Single European Sky (SES) European de-fragmentation, the Controller Working Position (CWP) definitely appears to be a favourite candidate for the definition of Service Interface based on clear and open industry standard interfaces with related data services.
The objective of the B.04.04 project was to define open and common service interfaces for decoupling the Controllers Working Position (CWPs) from ATM Data Service Providers (ADSPs). The B.04.04 Task 004 (Demonstration phase) aimed to show and assess the technical feasibility of using common open service interfaces by implementing the services defined in B.04.04 Task 003.
Figure 1: Target architecture
Project B.04.04 conducted two main tasks:
Development of a logical service model for decoupling CWPs and ATM Data Service Providers
Demonstrating the usability of modelled services by verifying prototypical implementations
The project successfully proved the feasibility of modelling common service interfaces and their usability through several prototypical implementations that verified the modelled interfaces. The results of the project are an important precursor for a more in-depth research and development of Virtual Centre concept in SESAR 2020.
1.1 Project progress and contribution to the Master Plan
The objective of this project was the feasibility demonstration of key enablers of the Virtual Centre Concept. Consequently three steps have been conducted:
Project Number B.04.04 Edition 01.00.02 D01- Final Project Report
The first step was the scoping of the project (Task 2 T002), identifying the sub-scope of core functions of CWPs to take into account in the project.
The second step, according to the functional scope identified, was to design the CWP services (Task 3 T003) applying the SESAR methodology.
The main methodology used during this service design activity has been the SESAR Working Method on Services [9], managed by project B.04.03.
B.04.04 also used the Information Service Reference Model (ISRM) [12] tool in order to model the Services in the common repository for SESAR Services, with link to ATM Information Reference Model (AIRM) and its Consolidated Logical Data Model (CLDM) [11].
The activity of service design began with the identification of the operational activities and related Information Exchanges Requirements. B.04.04 has analysed operational documentation produced by operational projects: DOD, OSED, etc. and has used the EATMA framework, comprising the analysis of the EATMA repository [13] and its related MEGA modelling tool to ensure consistency of the generated models with defined SESAR methodology. When needed, Enterprise Architect was used in order to model specific operational Use Cases. NOV-2 and NOV-5 NAF views [10] were verified (when already available from other projects outputs) or produced (in other cases) during this activity in order to identify and describe the information exchanges between CWPs and other ATM functional blocks.
Taking into account both :
- Information Exchange Requirements from operational projects or specific operational modelling,
- Data exchanges of functional blocks with CWP functional block, which are identified in the 10.01.07 Technical Architecture Description (TAD) [8]
Project Number B.04.04 Edition 01.00.02 D01- Final Project Report
A service architecture has been defined and proposed as basis for service activity to the Service Coordination Group (SCG), in order to ensure the consistency of B.04.04 activities with other SESAR service activities.
Two sets of services have been prioritized by B.04.04 team for the service design conducted in Enterprise Architect tool. A first set of 6 Core services, with the objective to demonstrate them in the demonstration phase of the project. A second set of 5 services has been modelled during the last part of the project, linked to controller advanced tool, in order to cover nearly all CWP functional services.
The service identification and allocation activities have produced NSOV-1 and NSOV-4 diagrams, describing the high level part of the services.
The service design and interface definition activities have produced NSOV-2 and NSOV-5 logical data Model, as the agreement on payload was at logical level. Data identified in service payloads have been traced to AIRM repository. Data were also identified as Core or extension, depending if they were agreed by all partners or only identified and used by some partners.
The outputs of the eleven services modelled during the project were included in the eleven Service Description Documents which have been embedded in deliverable D07.
The third step was to verify through demonstration exercises (Task 4 T004) the adequacy of the first set of the modelled services with the information and interfaces needs of CWPs.
All partners have conducted demonstration exercises implementing the remote provision of common B.04.04 services (mainly from Flight Data Processing components) to CWPs located all around Europe. 4 different demonstration platforms were implemented, comprising 6 different CWPs and 5 different Data providers.
The intended configurations and scenarios were documented in Demonstration plan and Demonstration requirements documents. The results of the runs of the demonstrations were documented through verification reports, identifying the assessed services and potential lessons learned and improvements.
Contribution to the Master plan
The purpose of the project was to demonstrate the feasibility of key enablers of the Virtual Centre Concept, in order to assess the interest of its further development.
This Virtual Centre concept is one of the promising solutions to respond to the SESAR key feature of 'Enabling Aviation Infrastructure' (§4.3.4 of the Master Plan [14]) identified as 'Workstation service interface definition and virtual centre concept'.
The project, contributing to the development of the virtual centre concept, is addressing key objectives of the Master plan:
Lean and efficient use of ANS infrastructure: the virtualization of ANS infrastructure will enable to provide Air Traffic Control service irrespective of the location of the infrastructure. This will allow a more efficient and flexible use of resources, substantially improving the cost efficiency of service provision and relieving congested airspaces. Many operational scenarios are foreseen in this field of improvement, as dynamic delegation of airspace or contingency plans.
Supporting change in ATM: a benefit of virtual centre concept will be the decrease in the number of ATM infrastructures throughout Europe and an increase in the commonality of interfaces, being agreed through common or standardised services. Implementation and deployment of new ATM functionalities should then gain in cost efficiency and time to operation Europe wide.
Regarding the key performance areas of the Masterplan, the development of Virtual centre concept is directly improving 3 of them:
: On the technical side, with the decrease of ATM infrastructures to be deployed and maintained and with the standardization of interfaces. On the operational side, with the possibility of load balancing between ATSUs, closure of ATSUs during night hours or low traffic periods.
: Load balancing and contingency solutions will be enabled by virtual centre concept, with a positive impact on capacity.
: Contingency solutions could decrease the safety risk in case of operational or technical hazard.
The TRL level is not totally relevant as the global virtual centre concept was not in the scope of the project. Considering this concept, the TRL level achieved in the project is between 3 and 4:
Figure 3: Technology Readiness Levels
1.2 Project achievements
The overall objective of the project was to validate the feasibility of the Virtual Centre Concept, encouraging further activities in SESAR 2020 to develop solutions for this concept.
This objective has been successfully achieved with positive results on the two main challenging tasks of the project:
the service interface definition for CWPs
the demonstration phase of remote services
Service interface definition
The result of the design of common CWP service interfaces within the partners of the project was the delivery of 11 common ATM services for CWPs. These services covered most of the core functionalities needed by controllers for En-Route and approach operations which represented 90% of the functional interfaces identified for CWPs.
The agreement between the partners over these 11 services covered a list of 121 specific operations, 39 being optional. These operations have been designed using payload models, identifying at logical level all the Data elements used in the services to cover these ATM functionalities.
Project Number B.04.04 Edition 01.00.02 D01- Final Project Report
The core data elements have been agreed, covering core ATM functionalities.
Another achievement of the service design phase was the identification and sharing of specific partner's parameters (around 30% of all identified data), that could now be further analysed in order to identify possible harmonisation, but are mainly reflecting specific partner's functionalities.
Figure 4: Ratio of core and extension classes / attributes
The results of this service design were stored in 11 Service Description Documents (SDD) using the SESAR template.
Project Number B.04.04 Edition 01.00.02 D01- Final Project Report
The demonstration phase of the project consisted in 4 major demonstration scenarios and platforms involving all 11 partners. 6 different CWPs and 5 different service providers from different vendors were used on these platforms. CWPs were most often remotely located hundreds of kilometres from the service provider systems. The functional scope covered 5 of the modelled services covering a subset of 19 operations.
Figure 5: Ratio of services and operations demonstrated
The assessment of the modelled operations has been very positive:
all objectives of the demonstration phase were achieved:
Figure 6: Demonstration Objectives
whereas few difficulties were encountered to implement the service interfaces modelled, quite a lot of successes were achieved:
Figure 7: Successes
A third main achievement of the project was the dissemination of knowledge about Virtual Centre concept throughout the ATM community, and the demonstration of the feasibility of the concept:
This has been achieved through a Virtual Centre event organised in Vienna with participation of numerous ATM architects, through presentations of the project results and virtual centre concept during WAC 2016 and SESAR Showcase event.
The overall activities conducted in the B.04.04 project demonstrated that the Virtual Centre Concept in SESAR was an achievable concept and that further activities to develop it would be highly valuable.
Project Number B.04.04 Edition 01.00.02 D01- Final Project Report
1.3 Project Deliverables The following table presents the relevant deliverables that have been produced by the project.
Reference Title Description
D02 Description of the scope of the controller Workstation
This document provides a common understanding of controller workstation position capabilities in the context of given deployment scenarios.
D07 Operational and Service modelling report
Document detailing the service activities, including the operational modelling, the service architecture and the service design. A short summary of each modelled service is provided with links to Service Description Documents and models
D04 Evaluation report Describes the various demonstrations undertaken by the project supported by the interface services defined by the previous task and summarizes the results of the Demonstration phase, with links to individual demonstration reports.
D05 Conclusion report Conclusion report providing the main outputs and lessons learned of B.04.04 project
1.4 Contribution to Standardisation
The Virtual Centre Concept is currently defined as:
"The Virtual Centre Concept refers to the geographical decoupling of the ATM Data Service Providers (ADSPs) from the Air Traffic Service Units (ATSUs) in order to enable the consolidation of today's highly fragmented ATM systems.
In SESAR projects, the objective is to decouple these entities through open and ‘ready-to-standardize’ service interfaces based on an open service-oriented architecture (SOA). This decoupling takes into account the flexibility and performance aspects of the services to ensure the ability of the virtual centre solution to support the same operational performance.
The ADSPs provide ATM data services, such as flight data management & distribution, voice communication and surveillance and for ATFCM (Air Traffic Flow and Capacity Management), EnRoute, Approach and Tower domains. "
Considering this definition, the Virtual Centre concept will encourage the standardisation of interfaces providing information to Virtual Centres, using common, open and standardised services. This will be a breakthrough on standardisation of ATM systems as today very few interfaces are harmonised for CWPs and other operational HMIs in control centres.
The impact will also comprise a harmonization of functionalities offered to European controllers and end-users, as well as an increased agility to commission new functionalities, as fewer interfaces will have to be modified compared to today fragmentation of ATM systems.
In project B.04.04, the definition and design of the services has been achieved at logical level, which provides compatibility between services at information level, but permits to implement differently the services at physical and technology levels. The level of needed standardisation enabling a seamless transition from one service provider to another is to be clarified in future activities.
Project Number B.04.04 Edition 01.00.02 D01- Final Project Report
The objective of B.04.04 project was to commonly design service interfaces for Controller Working Positions and to demonstrate their usability to provide remotely ATM information from potential ADSPs (service providers) to CWPs.
The overall goal was to assess the feasibility of key enablers of Virtual Centre concept in order to validate the interest of further activities on this concept.
The conclusion of the project was that the common design of such service interfaces, with a standardisation objective, is possible, and that their use in demonstration activities was a success, verifying their adequacy to the operational needs for the demonstrated scope.
In addition to these technical results, communication activities have been conducted in order to disseminate these results and the positive feasibility of the concept throughout the ATM community: Virtual Centre concept is now well known and clearly considered as achievable.
From these positive results, it is recommended that further activities would be planned in order to develop the Virtual centre Concept in SESAR 2020 to progress on the maturity level of the concept.
Recommendations
The B.04.04 project has succeeded in commonly design a core set of service interfaces for Controller Working Positions and has demonstrated the possibility to operate them with remote services using different providers on different technologies. However, there is still some room for improvement and the following 10 recommendations for a way forward have been elaborated from the experience gained during B.04.04 project. 5 lessons learned and subsequent recommendations come from modelling activities and 5 from Demonstration activities.
Modelling activities:
Recommendation #1: The input material was very diverse. Therefore, a unique methodology was not adapted due to the huge effort to harmonize the input material. Different methodologies need to be applied depending on the input context in order to keep the effort within a reasonable range. An early agreement on the methodologies ensures consistent modelling amongst the participants.
Recommendation #2: For operational modelling, the use of SESAR1 operational models, followed by the use of the TAD plus EATMA traceability proved to be most useful. Modelling of legacy systems should only be considered if really needed, as it is time consuming.
Recommendation #3: EATMA models are constantly evolving. Thus, B.04.04 had to state explicitly to which EATMA baseline the service models would be traced to. For any future project, the use of a common modelling tool would ease the traceability management.
Recommendation #4: It is essential that objectives of the modelling process and the expected models are clearly defined from the beginning.
Recommendation #5: The discussions within the design process have been intense and time consuming. Therefore it is clearly recommended to record the design decisions in a kind of rationale
Project Number B.04.04 Edition 01.00.02 D01- Final Project Report
document per service. This allows to recap those design decision taken earlier in the project. The current SDD usually just presents the model but not necessarily the design decisions and rationale.
Demonstration activities:
Recommendation #6: Increase the maturity of the service design towards common and standardised service interfaces covering the operational scope of Virtual Centre concept. It is recommended to extend the current implementation to all services and operations used by a CWP. It is recommended to create a plan and define a strategy (e.g. roadmap, objectives) to implement this recommendation.
Figure 8: Verification Strategy
Recommendation #7: It is recommended to anticipate further activities in the domain of Virtual Centre and Service Oriented Architecture and to prepare in accordance the technology. Therefore, it is recommended to industrialize the prototypes in view of future development and use and adapt the industrial products accordingly.
Figure 9: Industrialisation of prototypes
Recommendation #8: B.04.04 doesn't yet reach the TRL4. It is proposed to take into account the output and associated deliverables from B.04.04 and to take the necessary actions to increase the Technology Readiness Level.
Figure 10: Technology Readiness Levels
Recommendation #9: while all Demo # offered to have several partners, it is observed that only a limited number of partners join the same Demo. It is recommended to set up cross validation exercises where everyone could join. This would also require addressing a number of extensions that are modelled so that all operations of the services can be demonstrated by all in the same manner.
Project Number B.04.04 Edition 01.00.02 D01- Final Project Report
Recommendation #10: Differences noted between Demos # regarding size of data and response time should be further investigated.
Figure 12: investigation activities
From a more generic perspective, taking into account the objective to design and implement all dimensions of the Virtual Centre Concept, which was not the scope of B.04.04 project, organisation of further studies could follow these 6 recommendations:
Recommendation #11: Identify and prioritize the best business scenarios (e.g.: contingency support, remote provision of services, …) and high level architecture for the concept. In particular, B.04.04 did not address the specific operational use cases nor any high level architecture description for Virtual Centre Concept for which further studies must be conducted as a basis for definition of adequate services enabling the concept.
Recommendation #12: develop and model required operational use cases using Virtual Centre Concept for prioritized business scenarios, in order to identify all operational activities and corresponding information that must be taken into account in the service design.
Recommendation #13: Improve the coverage of Virtual Centre scope in the service design, taking into account the operational scope identified in the prioritized business scenarios. That could require to address more ATM functionalities, but also voice communication, ATFCM capabilities and also to address non-functional requirements that are mandatory to
Project Number B.04.04 Edition 01.00.02 D01- Final Project Report
Recommendation #14: Improve the standardisation level of designed services for Virtual Centres. In project B.04.04, the definition of service payloads has only been achieved at logical level. The required level of standardisation for enabling a seamless transition from one service provider to another is to be clarified in future activities.
Recommendation #15: All new activities must be integrated in the SESAR framework, adding the concept of ADSP and Virtual centre in EATMA and registering Virtual Centre services in ISRM SWIM repository in order to guarantee the consistency within SESAR services.
Recommendation #16: As a final point, it is recommended to define priorities in all these activities, in order to propose a stepwise improvement of the concept, and stepwise implementation, validation and commissioning.
Project Number B.04.04 Edition 01.00.02 D01- Final Project Report
[3] Multilateral Framework Agreement (“MFA”) signed between the SJU, EUROCONTROL and its 15 selected members on August 11, 2009, amended on 14 June 2010, 19 October 2010 and 2 July 2012
[4] B.04.04-Workstation, service interface definition, Delineation of the workstation scope, D02, Edition 00.01.02, 10/04/2015
