Many Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems (Air Navigation Services Providers, Airports, Airlines Operation Centres, Meteo Service Providers, Aeronautical Services Providers, Airspace Users, Military, etc.) still communicate using various custom-designed one-to-one protocols, maintained locally, without being standardized. In addition, the ATM information structure, provision and consumption are specific per system and inconsistently updated. This leads to a lot of bilateral communications, low reuse, inefficiency, and cost increase.
In order to tackle this situation, the System Wide Information Management (SWIM) relies on a network of SWIM nodes (also called ‘ATM intranet’) which dramatically reduces the number of interfaces, decouples the information providers from the information consumers, and capitalizes on open standards.
It also completely changes the management of information along its lifecycle and across the European ATM system, thus considerably facilitating the exchange of information between a wide range of ATM stakeholders.
As explained in the ICAO SWIM Concept of Operations, SWIM will bring operational benefits by providing commonly understood, accurate and secured information delivered to the right stakeholders at the right time, in order to support them in collaborating and taking the right decisions. This seamless information access and interchange will allow the ATM community to conduct its business and operations in a safer and more efficient manner.
At the SWIM nodes, SWIM-enabled applications use interoperable services to exchange information conveyed through a SWIM Technical Infrastructure (SWIM-TI) middleware based on an IP-based network.
The three PJ.17 solutions build on the SESAR 1 results to extend the SWIM-TI (which will be a key communication enabler for other SESAR 2020 solutions):
• PJ.17-01 (SWIM-TI Purple Profile for Air/Ground Advisory Information Sharing) to integrate the aircraft into the SWIM network, thus giving it access to air/ground existing or new services (e.g. in meteorological and aeronautical domains);
• PJ.17-03 (SWIM-TI Green Profile for G/G Civil Military Information Sharing) to provide ground/ground secured access by the military to the civil SWIM network, leading to quicken civil/military collaboration.
• PJ.17-08 (SWIM-TI Common Runtime Registry) to develop a Runtime Registry extending the capability of the SESAR 1 SWIM-TI design-time (static) registry by acting as a real-time directory, used to dynamically discover and connect to deployed SWIM services.
