PACAS aims to provide support for change management in ATM systems by effectively collecting and representing expert knowledge, capturing possible changes and their corresponding impacts on the ATM system, and finally reasoning on these representations to find the optimal solution based on stakeholder-defined criteria. Thus, the participatory process and platform build on the following innovation pillars (in line with the overall PACAS R&D activities):
● Multi-view participatory design process to support change management for European ATM Systems architectural design. The process represents a new way for stakeholders to collaborate in an open-ended, engaging (through gamification) yet rigorous process that, by aligning the experts’ perspectives, should result in a more harmonized evolution of the EATMA.
● Innovative multi-view, multi-level and multi-stakeholder concepts for modelling ATM systems to capture strategic objectives of the involved domain stakeholders, emphasizing the sociotechnical nature of ATM systems. We have identified the state of art modelling techniques for each PACAS perspective, tailoring a separate view per expertise (economics, organization, security and safety).
● New reasoning techniques that allow analyzing strategic objectives from multiple perspectives and the interdependencies between the strategic and functional (operational, service, system) levels to preserve their alignment. We have identified the state of art reasoning techniques through an in-depth gap analysis, defined impact propagation techniques per view, and developed multi-objective trade-off analysis.
The impact of the work conducted so far remains that of the adoption of the PACAS participatory framework, which is expected to strongly support the achievement of the following goals described in the ATM Architecture SESAR Exploratory Research Topic (ER-10-2015):
● Better understand and model how architectural and design choices influence the ATM system and its various behaviors,
● Propose innovative approaches, derived also from other industrial domains, such as participatory design,
● Model changes and support in a structured way change management and decision-making.
As far as socio-economic and societal impacts are concerned, the proposed Participatory Design Approach will have a great impact in motivating and involving ATM stakeholders at different levels and also in better communicating and sharing information and objectives as part of a change management decision-making process.
