Flight information exchange via net-centric services

Abstract

Flight information in Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems today is scattered across multiple systems in proprietary formats. Systems must maintain multiple point-to-point connections to access data necessary to fulfill operational objectives leading to high overhead costs. For example, flight messages from the en-route system are accessed through the legacy interfaces in a proprietary format, which requires domain knowledge of the data definition and format in order to parse the content. Developing and maintaining such connections and formats increases costs to both the consumer and the provider. The FAA's Next Generation (NextGen) solution is to abstract the data content and information to standard formats and publish the data to net-centric services in order to provide common services and governance for net-centric data sharing. Through a set of demonstrations, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has shown improved logical and physical simplicity and harmonization of flight information exchange through standardized data and net-centric services. During these demonstrations, it was determined that flight information common support services must be hosted at the enterprise level and made accessible through System Wide Information Management (SWIM) as net-centric services in order for governance rules to be enforced and information be shared authoritatively to the global flight community.