Information Services Architecture within Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM)

Abstract

This paper presents a notional implementation of a standards-based, reusable information services architecture within a conceptual Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM) framework in the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS). This architecture is modeled off the NAS Common Reference (NCR) system, which was initially deployed in September 2021 by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) System Wide Information Management (SWIM) Program. NCR ingests messages from multiple data producers via FAA SWIM, extracts relevant attributes from messages and stores them in a database, and offers flexible geospatial, temporal, and attribute filters for requesting and retrieving consistently correlated SWIM data. NCR addresses several enterprise shortfalls, namely: (1) the complexity of deriving geospatial and temporal attributes from disparate data sets; (2) the lack of standardized filtering mechanisms offered by individual producers of data; and (3) varying coordinate reference systems underpinning data published across the NAS enterprise. This paper considers implementation of the NCR service architecture in a UTM framework by a hypothetical UAS Service Supplier (USS). Among its many functions within the FAA concept for UTM, a USS collects and disseminates data critical for Operators of UAS beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) to maintain situational awareness and to de-conflict from other traffic both strategically and tactically. This data includes (but is not limited to) airspace constraints, traffic advisories, weather, and low-altitude hazards.