MADRID - 3 March 2014. The SESAR Joint Undertaking and its members have won this year’s HIS Jane’s ATC Award for outreach work on System Wide Information Management (SWIM), which led to an unprecedented number of Air Traffic Management (ATM) stakeholders becoming engaged in the goal of making SWIM a reality. The prestigious award was bestowed upon SESAR during a ceremony at the CANSO ATM dinner in Madrid, which brought together 400 delegates from the global ATM and air transport community. Wim Post, Programme Managemer for SWIM at the SESAR Joint Undertaking received the award on behalf on the SESAR Joint Undertaking, and its members and partners.

The award recognised SESAR’s success in raising awareness and involving a growing community of ATM stakeholders in the implementation of SWIM. SESAR’s nomination was assessed by a panel of experienced judges from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the International Federation of Air Traffic Controllers’ Associations (IFATCA), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Eurocontrol, CANSO, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and IHS Jane's Airport Review.

SESAR’s SWIM Outreach kicked off at the 2013 World ATM Congress where SESAR members demonstrated for the first time in front of a live, global audience the agility and flexibility that SWIM can bring, and how it can be instrumental in supporting new ATM Collaborative Decision-Making processes. The three demonstration sessions that took place involved 10 ATM organisations interconnecting 31 prototypes for exchanging information on airspace, flights, airports and weather. They tested SWIM’s promise of information sharing, service orientation, federation, open standards and information and service lifecycle management.

The second outreach initiative was the SWIM Master Class (June-November 2013), which welcomed 64 teams worldwide, ranging from software development companies to universities, actively demonstrating their SWIM-enabled applications. The 2013 edition attracted an increased number of ATM service providers, which offered development teams a wider scope of data and services to exploit in their SWIM-enabled applications or web services.

The success of SESAR’s SWIM Outreach is testament to the commitment shown by the SESAR members, particularly the work packages and projects leaders* for their day-to-day organisational facilitation and support, and those who participated in last year’s live SWIM demonstration and SESAR SWIM Master Class. Together they showed how easily the SWIM principles can be applied to deliver operationally useful information to ATM stakeholders.

The SWIM Master Class and live demonstrations clearly increased the understanding among ATM community on SWIM and encouraged increased involvement. “It is very encouraging to see the significant progress that the SWIM community has made in just two years thanks to SESAR’s SWIM Outreach. These activities are proving to be powerful mechanisms with which to engage stakeholders in building a critical mass of knowledge on SWIM and setting in motion an important change process in the ATM system,” said Claude Chêne, Executive Director of the SESAR Joint Undertaking.

Going global with SWIM will be key for the future of ATM, which is why the SESAR Joint Undertaking has included activities for global SWIM interoperability demonstrations it within its latest call on Large Scale Demonstrations. This will further broaden the geographical scope of the SESAR SWIM Outreach activities. The SESAR Programme is already collaborating closely with a range of global partners, but with this latest call the goal to take SWIM to the next level of global ambition.

* P14.04: Dirk Janssens, EUROCONTROL
  WP14: Philippe Tubery, Thales and Dario di Crescenzo, Selex ES
  WP08: Peder Blomqvist, NORACON