Even in the best conditions, ATM operations present a complex scenario to orchestrate. Within a shared airspace network, aircraft operators, airport authorities, and ANSPs must meet a diverse set of business priorities while sharing a portion of their business resources.
Aircraft operators are trying to get passengers to and from scheduled destinations while managing independent resources such as crew and aircraft. Airport operators are trying to run an efficient surface operation for optimal aircraft turnarounds to pass demand through their node in the network. ANSPs are trying to deliver the aircraft to and from destinations in an orderly, and more importantly, a safe fashion.
For each stakeholder, a range of operations planning goes into their daily business to try and mitigate sub-optimal conditions or unforeseen circumstances. What if a crew member calls in sick, or a replacement part takes longer to be delivered than anticipated? What if a jetway breaks down, rendering a gate useless, or a taxiway is unavailable? What if a thunderstorm materializes right over a congested terminal area?
With a global increase in demand and the world returning to and surpassing pre-pandemic levels, these scenarios are not “Ifs” but “Whens.”
Systems management
This problem is not a new one, which is why each of these stakeholders has systems and automation that focus on their respective problems. Aircraft operators have a myriad of systems that look after crew and maintenance schedules, passenger connections, on-time performance, and dozens of other metrics critical to running an airline. Most relevant to this topic for airport authorities is Airport Collaborative Decision Making (A-CDM) systems, which integrate data from all airport stakeholders to help predict gate occupancies, departure queues, and departure times, amongst other capabilities, to create a smoother airport operation.
ANSPs have systems that span multiple time and geographic scopes, from system-wide solutions like Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) that strategically and pre-tactically predict and balance demand and capacity at airports and airspaces across an entire area of responsibility, to more focused solutions like ATC systems that separate traffic in specific sectors or arrival management (AMAN) and departure management (DMAN) systems that are airport specific to tactically smooth the delivery of inbound and outbound traffic.
At any given time, a flight leg, much less an airframe, could be under the control of a dozen systems managed across all three primary stakeholders, many of whom do not communicate with one another. Surprisingly often, due to poor planning or technical limitations, systems within a specific stakeholder are not even integrated.
Let us take for example, an ATFM ground-delay introduced due to a forecast for convective weather on a single flight several hours before take-off. Immediately, the aircraft operator will need to know about the delay to begin to assess the impacts to crew and maintenance scheduling, aircraft positioning, passenger connections, and downstream scheduled legs for that airframe.
The airport authority will need to know of this delay to ensure that the delayed gate occupancy and associated ground resources are accounted and planned for. The ANSP, who in most cases would be the authority for issuing ATFM delay, would need this information to make it to any ATC strip, so tower controllers can assist in ground-delay compliance as well as any AMAN system to properly predict when the flight will enter its planning horizon. DMAN systems will also be affected by the delayed outbound leg for the airframe, which the aircraft operator will also be assessing.
From this single event, a ripple effect takes place. In an environment that is not integrated, this ripple will skew the views of the other systems managing the affected flight. This scenario can be turned to the perspective of any other stakeholder’s operation. If a delay forces a crew member to time out and additional delay is required to solve that issue, how is that information getting back to the ANSP or the airport authority? If an A-CDM system is predicting a delayed off-block time for an aircraft, what, or more importantly, who is making sure the A-CDM system at the inbound airport, any airline management system or ANSP system like ATFM or AMAN is aware of this delay?
Systems interference
Counterintuitively, while each of these systems is intended to introduce efficiency into ATM operations, if they are not integrated, the opposite effect can occur. In the simplest of examples, systems can interfere with each other by assigning conflicting controls. An A-CDM system unaware of a calculated off-block time (COBT) from an ATFM system can assign a target off-block time (TOBT) that conflicts with the ATFM control.
This is why it is vital to view ATM operations as an ecosystem that requires as much integration and common situational awareness across systems as possible. Even manually coordinating and making this data available to the most capable individual is too data-dense of a task to ask any human to accomplish in a meaningful manner, not to mention to scale, emphasizing the need for stitching the distributed pieces of stakeholder automation together.
Broader system-to-system integration within the ATM ecosphere will ensure that the correct data makes it to the right system as early as possible, affording as much runway or look ahead time to identify an appropriate solution.
Fortunately, Metron Aviation is seeing its ANSP customers begin to recognise this need for integration. The company is currently working on an ATFM / A-CDM integration project between an ANSP and the local airport authority. It has also completed an ATFM / DMAN integration with a planned AMAN addition for a different ANSP.
Additionally, the company has built a component in our system architecture specifically intended for system-to-system integration, hosting a series of services to submit, query or passively receive data from Metron Aviation’s Harmony ATFM system. The company has seen airlines around the world and other organisations take advantage of these data interfaces for advanced integration.
“It is vital to view ATM operations as an ecosystem that requires as much integration and common situational awareness across systems as possible”
Leveraging data standards can only increase the proliferation of system integration. Metron Aviation’s work is leveraging the Aviation Information Data Exchange (AIDX) format, and the creation of large-scale System Wide Information Management (SWIM) platforms by the FAA and EUROCONTROL provide standardised data access by way of the Flight Information Exchange Model to some of the busiest airspaces on earth. We have seen a flurry of activity from our US airline customers focused on increasing capability off of SWIM integration, which is a positive sign for this topic.
While integrating traditional systems is critical, as emerging technology becomes more readily available, it is also important to keep an eye on what is possible today that was not yesterday. In any ATFM operation, predicting airspace crossing times and airport arrival times is exceedingly important, especially for airborne traffic.
Traditionally, Metron Aviation would integrate its ATFM solution with the ANSPs local surveillance. In the case of Singapore, local surveillance covers around 10% of the airspace that the trajectories of their traffic fly. This is one of the more severe cases, but an issue for every ANSP is that they only see position updates for traffic in their areas of responsibility.
Additionally, receiving departure messages via traditional and standardized air traffic service messages was not always reliable, meaning ANSPs sometimes had no idea when a flight was inbound to their airspace until it arrived. To rectify this issue, in the last five years Metron Aviation has partnered with commercial third-party vendors, which provide both terrestrial and satellite-based global Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) data. This global surveillance is a relatively new dataset that significantly enhances the fidelity of our system predictions and subsequent expected arrival time (ETA) outputs to other systems.
Similarly, Metron Aviation has been talking to various companies working on fascinating artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for apron operations to track operational milestones not currently managed by existing automation. By leveraging camera infrastructure at the gates, these companies are making available data that previously would have required a human with a clipboard and a stopwatch at each apron, manually recording data and calculating off-block times (OBTs) to achieve. Integrating this type of system and data with an A-CDM system would provide superior OBTs to any human-generated time value, therefore increasing efficiency by enabling a capability previously unavailable. New technologies like this are constantly evolving to create broader, more accurate datasets or capabilities previously unknown that need to be evaluated to enhance existing functionality or even open the door for new concepts.
As the Covid pandemic’s impact gets smaller in the world’s rear-view mirror, existing capacity is beginning to reach its peak across the global civil airspace infrastructure. Even with various ATM systems peppered across the landscape, an increase in capacity is being evaluated in every region.
Short of a large-scale capital investment like a new runway, terminal, or even an entirely new airport, ATM offers the best solution to squeezing all the capacity out of what already exists, and system-to-system integration will make the most efficient use of that capacity at a much more reasonable cost than breaking ground on any construction project. It may seem daunting, but with industry-ready and willing to work together to make this happen, now is as good a time as any to get started.