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Transportation

Several Transportation applications, such as Air Traffic Control and Management, Railway Traffic Management, and Metropolitan Traffic Management, share the need of tracking increasingly high volumes of traffic in realtime and perform complex control rules, some of which human assisted, to ensure safety, efficiency, and to maximize business goals.

The challenges that many of these applications face today is to cope with increasing traffic volumes, support new operational and regulatory requirements, while achieving reasonable business goals.

Air Traffic Control and Management

• View the OpenSplice DDS Air Traffic Control & Air Traffic Management Datasheet

Air Traffic Control and Management provides a good example of the challenges faced in general by Transportation. OpenSplice DDS, as described below, has been selected as the standard technology to solve these challenges in Air Traffic Control and Management, but equally in metropolitan and rail transportation.

Challenge #1 - Increasing Traffic Volumes. The forecast for the air traffic growth rate, will lead by 2025 to a 3x increase in the number of flights.

Traffic growth projections, courtesy of “NextGen JPDO”

This steep increase, as claimed by several administrations, is not manageable with the currently deployed systems, with an increasing number of experts believing that even HW upgrades won’t allow to reach the required level of performances. Failing in to meet the required performance could will lead to more delays for travelers, lower operational efficiency, more pollution due to increased busy wait times, lower safety, higher operational costs and thus lower revenues.

Challenge #2 - System Wide Information Management. Currently deployed Air Traffic Control and Management are organized as a set of systems connected point-to-point, often using different protocols, and relying on some form of human assistance in order to exchange data. As shown in the picture below, under this scheme the sharing of data as well as the integration of new components is not simple at all as it requires to implement a specific integration for each of the components with which data exchange is needed.

The lack of ubiquitous access to information is posing serious challenges with respect to the ability to optimize the operational efficiency, implement new operational and regulatory requirements.

DDS in Air Traffic Control and Management

The two key challenges of Air Traffic Control and Management find a natural solution in the DDS Technology. As such, some of the most advanced next generation Air Traffic Control and Management programs, such as the European Flight Data Processor, eFDP, have chosen to use DDS as both a very high performance data bus within the FDP, as well as the data bus that will make information ubiquitously accessible to the various elements of an Air Traffic Control System, as well as across Air Traffic Control Centers.

Thanks to the DDS technology, newly developed, and upgraded, systems are able to easily scale out to cope with the traffic growth while at the same time making information ubiquitously available.

The importance of DDS as one of the key element for solving the system wide information was recently recognized by EUROCONTROL and captured in a recommendation that insists for the use of DDS for achieving seamless flight data exchange and interoperability across Air Traffic Control Centers.