On 20 June, CEOs from the A6 Alliance of air navigation service providers, COOPANS, DFS, DSNA, ENAIRE, ENAV,  NATS, PANSA, Skyguide, and general managers from industry manufacturers, Indra, Leonardo and Thales, signed a joint statement committing to transition to a new service delivery model for air traffic management in Europe, as defined in the context of the European ATM Master Plan update campaign.
 

We recognise the urgency and the necessity of this transformation, especially in the light of the unprecedented challenges posed by the increase in traffic, the war in Ukraine and the climate crisis. We are convinced that a Digital European Sky will further enhance the safety, efficiency, resilience, and sustainability of the aviation sector and contribute to the competitiveness of our economies. It will provide further resilience, scalability and more flexibility in case of occurrences that heavily impact the traffic flow and demand in Europe (e.g., pandemic, volcanic eruptions, etc).

To facilitate deeper and faster changes across the five transformation levers identified in the European ATM Master Plan, the current service delivery model, which relies on current architectures, urgently need to be replaced by a modern, data-driven, and cloud-based service-oriented architecture (SOA) delivery model. This new approach will allow for quicker deployment of new features and improvements while ensuring interoperability in operations, airspace and technology across ANSPs.

Moreover, the transition to SOA will facilitate the development of a technical regulatory framework for future air traffic management in Europe. Rather than overhauling and certifying an entire system, this future-proof framework will enable the development or update of specific services to meet new standards. In doing so, it will be better aligned with best practices applied in other safety- and security-critical sectors.

Future challenges for Service Oriented Architecture, to be tackled with priority, comprise modernisation of the CNS service provision that have to accompany the new service delivery model with new technical enablers and high-performance air and ground connectivity and the identification of an adequate cybersecurity perimeter enabling the decoupling between service and infrastructure and delivery of services from distributed sources.

This joint statement is an expression of commitment of the signatories to work together to implement as rapidly as possible a new core ATM service delivery model for all operational environments that enables:

• Open ATM patterns enabling integration of components provided by various system providers to facilitate multi-vendor solutions using open platforms and interfaces
• Decoupling of service and infrastructure layers as defined in the ATM Master Plan through Cloud Computing (including the various system components)
• A cloud native architecture of components with standardised and open interfaces that can be deployed on commodity cloud technologies                                                                                              

For this implementation to be a success we commit to working together in a spirit of collaboration, trust and partnership under the SESAR umbrella (SESAR Joint Undertaking and SESAR Deployment Manager), together with other SESAR participants and partners who are willing to join this statement and to also support operational use.

In order to be successful, we also need appropriate legal, regulatory, financial and standardisation frameworks to be put in place to enable a rapid transition to the new service delivery model.

We will ensure regular periodic reviews through existing processes and with other actors as we transition to the technology defined above, in order to keep the pace of the ATM Master Plan roadmaps and to enable a new era for aviation in a Digital European Sky.

We invite all partners to join this initiative.

Interested in joining? Contact Alain Siebert for more details: [email protected]