2.1. Data link related research projects
2.1.2. European project: SESAR
instance, 0.9995 service availability is quoted more than once for operational messages in EUROCONTROL technical documents [EUR 07]. Additionally, separation between operational and non-operational domains represents another design challenge for the future network infrastructure. Such a separation could be achieved at different layers of the protocol stack (i.e.
physical, link and network layers), all these possibilities are currently considered by the supporting research programs;
– security: one of the most challenging issues. Security must be taken into account in the design of all new emerging data links, but also in the applications and services themselves. From a robustness point of view, an end-to-end security covering all the aspects of the FCI is highly recommended as the consequences of a cyber-attack might be irreversible, involving not only loss of data or connectivity, but also human lives in most critical situations. The NextGen and SESAR contributors are paying a particular attention to security, several Work Packages (WPs) are dedicated to address cyber security in each program.
These fundamental services for the FCI are discussed in details in section 3.2.
provide, by the beginning of 2020, a fully compliant ATM system on a worldwide scale.
2.1.2.1. General project description
The European collaborative project entitled SESAR aims to modernize the future European ATM. The project is still in progress and is considered as probably one of the most important European Research and Development (R&D) collaborations ever launched by the European Commission, EUROCONTROL, Trans-European Transport Network Executive Agency (TEN-T EA) (http://tentea.ec.europa.eu) and other actors from the industry such as Airbus (http://www.airbus.com) and Thales (http://www.
thalesgroup.com). The aim of the project is to offer technical and operational solutions to meet future air traffic capacity and air safety needs. The total estimated cost of the development phase of SESAR is 3.1 billion €, to be shared equally between the academic community, EUROCONTROL and the industry.
The European ATM Master plan is SESAR’s roadmap for driving the European ATM modernization program. SESAR’s benefits are derived in four different areas: environment, cost-effectiveness, ATM capacity and safety. The different objectives of this master plan are:
– to prepare for the SESAR deployment phase;
– to promote and ensure global interoperability, in particular with the US NextGen ATM modernization program;
– to promote synchronization of ATM R&D, and deployment, to ensure global interoperability;
– to update the standardization and regulatory roadmaps.
These four objectives have been derived through different WPs, depending on the type of ATM systems that engineers are interested in.
These different WPs are related to different scientific themes such as:
operational activities, system development activities, system wide information management (SWIM) and transverse activities. According to the scientific scope of this book, only WPs related to data link communications will be described extensively. Readers who are interested in the entire
SESAR project can refer to the website www.sesarju.eu for the remaining WPs.
2.1.2.2. The different SESAR WPs related to data link communication technologies
Depending on the type of operations done by an aircraft during its flight, several type of data link communications can be exchanged. Thus, according to the aircraft flight mode (En-Route, Terminal or Airport), several SESAR WPs have been defined:
– WP 4 En-route Operations;
– WP 5 Terminal Operations;
– WP 6 Airport Operations.
Moreover, different data link communication systems can be investigated in the different WPs related to ATM system definition:
– WP 9 Aircraft Systems;
– WP 10 En-Route and Approach ATM Systems;
– WP 12 Airport Systems;
– WP 15 Non-Avionic CNS System.
An important part of SESAR research is related to network information management system through the WP 13, “Network Information Management System”. Indeed, the SWIM system (that will be extensively described in Chapter 3), which is the corner stone of the network information management system, needs additional communication technologies able to offer more performance and QoS to the different ATM entities. This SWIM system is investigated in the WP 14, “SWIM Technical Architecture”. The concept of SWIM covers a complete change in paradigm of how information is managed along its full lifecycle and across the whole European ATM system. SWIM architecture and features will be described extensively in Chapter 3. The different communication technologies, which can support SWIM deployment, will also be considered there.
There are also additional transverse activities that are in relation with data link communication technologies: for instance, the WP 3, “Validation
infrastructure adaptation and integration”. The objective of WP 3 is to support SESAR’s partners in developing the operational and technical tasks to properly define and coordinate the set-up of verification and validation testbeds. The different candidate communication technologies are considered and tested in this context.
Additional long-term and innovative research is also conducted inside SESAR through the WP-E work package. The main goal of this research work is to find future candidate technologies for the replacement of legacy ones. Different objectives have been defined for WP-E, but the interesting part related to future data link communication systems includes the work for moving toward higher levels of automation in ATM systems and also mastering complex ATM systems safely.
Note that a similar project, called NextGen, is being undertaken by the FAA to improve the American National Airspace System (NAS) and tackle the same air traffic congestion issues. This North American project is described in the following section.