The safety and efficiency of airport surface operations are to get an expected boost thanks to new SESAR solutions introduced to the advanced surface movement guidance and control (A-SMGCS) system. The solutions were successfully tested in October by SESAR founding member, Leonardo, and BULATSA, the Bulgarian air navigation service provider (ANSP), within the context of the SESAR 2020 Airside, Airport and Runway Throughput (AART) project.

Taking place in Rome, the validations used a Leonardo test platform to simulate in real-time the operational environment of Sofia Airport. The tests focused on enhancements made to the Leonardo’s A-SMGCS system including new safety support, routing and guidance capabilities, combined with the introduction of datalink to manage surface service vehicles.

A-SMGCS systems are used to track aircraft and vehicles at busy airfields, calculate their route on the airport surface and alert controllers about potential conflicts. The benefits of deploying A-SMGCS at airports is well known across the air traffic management community. As traffic demands grow at major European airports, there is a need to evolve the system to help ANSPs and airport operators to maintain high levels of efficiency and safety. These validations focused on a combination of solutions aimed at enhancing existing A-SMGCS systems, namely extended airport safety nets for controllers at A-SMGCS airports; digital surface management for airport vehicles; surface route planning and management operations.

Extended airport safety nets for controllers at A-SMGCS airports (# PJ.02-W2-21.1)

The Airport Safety Support service provides to controllers a set of alerts in case of short-term danger situations introduced either by traffic behaviour or by controller’s clearances. Airport Safety Nets are an essential aid in reducing risks of human errors and increasing safety especially in high traffic / high workload conditions or bad visibility. The baseline safety tools available to Controllers were enriched with a number of additional features, such as new alerts in case of ATC conflicting clearances on runway operations. Furthermore supplementary high-visibility graphical warnings (e.g. runway busy, or runway in conflict) were introduced, aiming at raising controller’s awareness on runway status and anticipating more effectively any hazardous situation.

PJ.02-W2-21.3: Digital surface management for airport vehicles (# PJ.02-W2-21.3)

In order to enhance surface management operations at large and medium airports, all actors, including surface vehicles, need to be integrated into the airport as nodes of a unique “system of systems”. Doing so allows for a seamless exchange of information between the controllers and vehicle drivers, and other actors. This is where datalink technologies come in, which offer streamlined and error-proof digital means for creating such a communication channel between controllers and vehicle drivers, both for traffic separation purposes and guidance, even in demanding traffic or adverse weather situations.

A number of vehicle-dedicated datalink messages and the definition of a new operational process means that datalink operations can be extended to vehicle movements. Datalink allows air traffic control (ATC) to give instructions and clearances to vehicle drivers in a reliable and digitised way. In doing so, datalink can help minimise transmission errors or misunderstandings, while reducing radio bandwidth occupancy and speeding up the overall surface management process.

The benefits of this solution includes reduced communication workload on the ATC frequency, simultaneous handling of different exchanges and reduced probability of miscommunication, as well as improved situational awareness of all human actors and increased safety.

Using datalink, the routes generated by the routing service can be easily transferred to the vehicle and displayed on-board as guidance information to the vehicle driver. Thanks to the guidance service, drivers can have continuous awareness about the trajectory to follow and their own position on the map, as well as an overview of all surrounding traffic. Especially in peak hours or in bad weather/visibility conditions, the guidance service significantly increases efficiency and safety of surface servicing.

Surface route planning and management operations (# PJ.02-W2-21.6)

Route planning has the purpose of calculating best ground routes for all airport traffic and relieving the controller from the task of manually determining them. The routing service is accessible to the controller on his working position. On top of the baseline routing function, the solution exploited a number of additional features which makes the interaction with the service more flexible and efficient, such as the integration with vehicle orders, graphical route editing capabilities, automatic re-routing and recovery in case of route deviations, adaptation of ground routes to low visibility operations. An enhanced working position was also designed to increase the ergonomics and the access to routing information.

The exercise involved eight BULATSA controllers and six Leonardo personnel for technical supervision and support roles. The objective in fact was not only to validate the evolution of A-SMGCS services in isolation, but also to validate their interactions in an integrated environment where stakeholders could experience a complete test case in a realistic environment.

Feedback collected by experts during the validation confirmed that the functionalities under test effectively contribute to increasing efficiency and situational awareness for both controllers and vehicle drivers. Additionally, all enhanced services were demonstrated to have positive effect on safety thanks to the reduction of possible overlooked events or human errors. The project plans to make recommendations for future standardisation of vehicle datalink.

The validation exercise achieved the ambition of integrating the three solutions together in a unique operating environment. While the three solution will end their R&D cycle in different timeframes (21.1 is planned to be ready for industrialisationand deployment in 2023, while the other two solutions will reach it in the coming years), the validation anticipated how deployment of these diverse tools and capabilities can actually happen together.

This project has received funding from the SESAR Joint Undertaking under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 874477