The Virtual Centre concept allows an innovative Virtual Centre architecture between ATSU and ADSP, enabling that a volume of airspace be controlled by one ATSU or another, e.g. depending on the availability of resources (business continuity, operational flexibility), or in order to provide service in the case of contingency (resilience). This is referred in the AAS as the “capacity-on-demand” service.
Complementing the Delegation of Airspace amongst ATSUs (SESAR Solution PJ10-W2-93) for what concerns the airspace delegation, and investigating the cross-border use of the DAC concept (SESAR Solution PJ09-W2-44), the Virtual Centre Wave3 proposal aims to further validate the airspace delegation in the Virtual Centre context (airspace delegation for two ATSUs (part of two different Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) but also including ATSUs within the same ANSP) which can deliver service over the same volume of airspace, potentially including a cross-border rostering scheme). In addition, it aims to increase the maturity level of the Virtual Centre concept itself. The overall objective is to demonstrate the positive impact of the Virtual Centre concept on improving the Network:
• The ability to dynamically adapt to changes in capacity e.g. in case of contingency in an ATSU, traffic needs or Air Traffic Controller (ATCO) shortage;
• The Cost-efficiency through the decoupling of the ATM data provision from the ATC service provision enabling flexible, scalable and resilient ATM service provision.
The conclusions after project execution are that the concept is feasible from an operational and technical viewpoint. However, by identifying different architectures used to deploy this concept, we have also matured these different architectures at different maturity levels.
The more innovative architectures raise a number of technical and security issues that are yet to be solved, and in parallel, we identify many barriers to the VC concept that are not technical but regulatory, societal or organisational. Therefore we recommend that future research activities focus on solutions that can be deployed in the short to medium term , focusing on technical solutions that are well proven.
