Periodic Reporting for period 4 - PJ14-W2 I-CNSS (Integrated Communication, Navigation and Surveillance System)
Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2023-06-30
PJ14-W2 I-CNSS, as one of the enabling projects, aims at providing advanced, integrated and rationalized aviation infrastructure for Communication, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS), providing the underlying technical capabilities to meet the operational improvements.
PJ14-W2 I-CNSS objectives support the first three Key Features, as described in the European ATM Master Plan:
• Optimized ATM Network services
• Advanced air traffic services
• High-Performing airport operations
Communication, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) systems provide the infrastructure and service which are essential for Air Traffic Management (ATM). CNS enables efficient navigation and safe separation in all phases of flight. Although current CNS systems are mature and globally providing a good service, they are still relying on a modular approach and all facing technological transition phases to reach the objectives of the SESAR Concept of Operations in terms of quality of service, cost effectiveness and environmental impact. All the ATM elements will require an underlying supporting infrastructure including communication, navigation and surveillance capabilities that are adapted to support the concept elements in an efficient way.
PJ.14 W2 is ensuring the availability of the required CNS infrastructure to support the future SESAR Ops Concept.
The key ambition of the PJ.14 W2 I-CNSS is to act as unique entity, to intervene exactly where CNS needs to evolve, by driving this evolution. PJ.14 W2 I-CNSS will develop an integrated suite of CNS solutions to meet the operational requirements of the ATM system in the short, medium and long term.
PJ14-W2 I-CNSS objectives support the first three Key Features, as described in the European ATM Master Plan:
• Optimized ATM Network services
• Advanced air traffic services
• High-Performing airport operations
Communication, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) systems provide the infrastructure and service which are essential for Air Traffic Management (ATM). CNS enables efficient navigation and safe separation in all phases of flight. Although current CNS systems are mature and globally providing a good service, they are still relying on a modular approach and all facing technological transition phases to reach the objectives of the SESAR Concept of Operations in terms of quality of service, cost effectiveness and environmental impact. All the ATM elements will require an underlying supporting infrastructure including communication, navigation and surveillance capabilities that are adapted to support the concept elements in an efficient way.
PJ.14 W2 is ensuring the availability of the required CNS infrastructure to support the future SESAR Ops Concept.
The key ambition of the PJ.14 W2 I-CNSS is to act as unique entity, to intervene exactly where CNS needs to evolve, by driving this evolution. PJ.14 W2 I-CNSS will develop an integrated suite of CNS solutions to meet the operational requirements of the ATM system in the short, medium and long term.
The main objectives from Wave2 have been achieved with the component elements of C, N and S most of all reaching TRL6 at the end of the phase.
On the Communication area point of view, the project intends to increase the maturity for the Future Communication Infrastructure to support the ATM evolution to safe and secure global platform for ATM communications. This introduces new services, applications and new communications technologies based on ATN/IPS: the future SATCOM Data link, the L-BAND Digital Aeronautical Communications System (LDACS) as replacement for VDLM2, new concept of Future Communication extended to open network services and commercial public radio needed for hyper-connected ATM, the use of SWIM concept an principles for A/G safety-critical information sharing, and the validation of the additional Green Profile specification to be integrated on the top of the standard Yellow profile.
Moreover, means for seamless transition from current ATN/OSI infrastructures to ATN-IPS infrastructures have been proposed, in order to facilitate the convergence of heterogeneous ATN-IPS implementations in a global, integrated “system-of-systems” communication infrastructures.
Looking at Navigation, the project concentrates its effort on the provision of a more efficient approach and landing solution to airports, reducing the environmental and noise impact by enabling more flexible approaches by bringing GBAS to a point where it can be industrialised and approved by aviation regulators. Ground based back up to GNSS navigation supporting the same PBN operations and, thereby, mitigating the risks of GNSS degradation is another ambition of the project that proposes a solution based on the improvement of the current DME and a long-term solution based on enhanced DME, vision-sensor, terrain-database and LDACS.
Finally, the project proposes the improvements on the quality of MET&AIS data services for users, with particular attention to flight preparation and anticipation of route modification in flight.
On the Surveillance point of view, the objective is to address the separate evolution of non-cooperative surveillance systems like MSPSR and Video Trackers, and cooperative surveillance systems such as ADS-B, Airport and Wide Area Multilateration (MLAT/WAM) systems as well as establishing new surveillance sensors to support emerging operational needs (like multiple remote tower surveillance). The objective is also the harmonisation and development of the Surveillance Performance Monitoring Tools to support a performance based surveillance (PBS) approach.
The Communication and Dissemination activities have been performed in order to achieve the widest dissemination of knowledge from the project. The activities have been expanded in two directions: towards the marketing activities in order to enhance the commercial potential of the results and towards the notification of project’s results in the International and standardization working groups. Communication and Dissemination are horizontal activities and concentrate on disseminating the results of PJ14 project itself to a wide range of existing or potential stakeholders.
On the Communication area point of view, the project intends to increase the maturity for the Future Communication Infrastructure to support the ATM evolution to safe and secure global platform for ATM communications. This introduces new services, applications and new communications technologies based on ATN/IPS: the future SATCOM Data link, the L-BAND Digital Aeronautical Communications System (LDACS) as replacement for VDLM2, new concept of Future Communication extended to open network services and commercial public radio needed for hyper-connected ATM, the use of SWIM concept an principles for A/G safety-critical information sharing, and the validation of the additional Green Profile specification to be integrated on the top of the standard Yellow profile.
Moreover, means for seamless transition from current ATN/OSI infrastructures to ATN-IPS infrastructures have been proposed, in order to facilitate the convergence of heterogeneous ATN-IPS implementations in a global, integrated “system-of-systems” communication infrastructures.
Looking at Navigation, the project concentrates its effort on the provision of a more efficient approach and landing solution to airports, reducing the environmental and noise impact by enabling more flexible approaches by bringing GBAS to a point where it can be industrialised and approved by aviation regulators. Ground based back up to GNSS navigation supporting the same PBN operations and, thereby, mitigating the risks of GNSS degradation is another ambition of the project that proposes a solution based on the improvement of the current DME and a long-term solution based on enhanced DME, vision-sensor, terrain-database and LDACS.
Finally, the project proposes the improvements on the quality of MET&AIS data services for users, with particular attention to flight preparation and anticipation of route modification in flight.
On the Surveillance point of view, the objective is to address the separate evolution of non-cooperative surveillance systems like MSPSR and Video Trackers, and cooperative surveillance systems such as ADS-B, Airport and Wide Area Multilateration (MLAT/WAM) systems as well as establishing new surveillance sensors to support emerging operational needs (like multiple remote tower surveillance). The objective is also the harmonisation and development of the Surveillance Performance Monitoring Tools to support a performance based surveillance (PBS) approach.
The Communication and Dissemination activities have been performed in order to achieve the widest dissemination of knowledge from the project. The activities have been expanded in two directions: towards the marketing activities in order to enhance the commercial potential of the results and towards the notification of project’s results in the International and standardization working groups. Communication and Dissemination are horizontal activities and concentrate on disseminating the results of PJ14 project itself to a wide range of existing or potential stakeholders.
PJ.14 W2 I-CNSS results expected are fully in line with the porposal of the Grant Amendment 874478 as per results of the 20 Maturity Gates successfully executed.
(a) Technical Impact
Main impact is in general on the integrated approach of the three domains, CNS as a unique entity and not as three separted domain. PJ.14-W2 has developed this ideas through its solutions, based on the support of PJ.14-W2-76 an integrated CNS suites able to provide a mature and consolidated CNS evolution, full addressing the vision, the strategy and the roadmap agreed.
(b) Economic Impact
The further development of the harmonised CNS performance based and service based approaches should enable cost savings to ANSPs and hence airspace users for provision of CNS. The performance based approach will enable rationalisation of disparate CNS systems, while the migration to a service based framework will allow different service delivery models to operate with the increase competition for the delivery of these services.
The harmonization of CNS services across civil and military platforms shall identify opportunities for cost effectiveness on both environments.
The availability of specific, stable and secure communication platform, with the designed extensibility, enables the independence from commercial providers, from their business plans and from their technologies with short update cycles.
(c) Social Impact
The successful implementation of the new technologies developed in the project will provide sure improvement in the secure and safe data communication. Nevertheless, it is noted that the data link and multilink concept are defined with the aim of making them transparent to the operators (pilots and controllers) in order to minimize the human impacts.
The improvements in Navigation will allow to have more flexible approaches, relieving local communities from noise issues and to improve the ability of ANSPs to design environmentally friendly routings to major airports and achieve the related benefits in pollution and noise enhancing the environmental sustainability and, hence, fostering public acceptance. Better relationships between airports and local communities may also improve the capacity of the airports by relaxing operational restrictions imposed due to noise issues.
Worldwide surveillance coverage from the airport, TMA and EN-ROUTE including the oceanic with a sensitive improvement of the accuracy and integrity, will have a progressive social impact. It will change the level of performance of the traffic flow management applications and challenge the way of controlling with some new interactions with the systems.
(a) Technical Impact
Main impact is in general on the integrated approach of the three domains, CNS as a unique entity and not as three separted domain. PJ.14-W2 has developed this ideas through its solutions, based on the support of PJ.14-W2-76 an integrated CNS suites able to provide a mature and consolidated CNS evolution, full addressing the vision, the strategy and the roadmap agreed.
(b) Economic Impact
The further development of the harmonised CNS performance based and service based approaches should enable cost savings to ANSPs and hence airspace users for provision of CNS. The performance based approach will enable rationalisation of disparate CNS systems, while the migration to a service based framework will allow different service delivery models to operate with the increase competition for the delivery of these services.
The harmonization of CNS services across civil and military platforms shall identify opportunities for cost effectiveness on both environments.
The availability of specific, stable and secure communication platform, with the designed extensibility, enables the independence from commercial providers, from their business plans and from their technologies with short update cycles.
(c) Social Impact
The successful implementation of the new technologies developed in the project will provide sure improvement in the secure and safe data communication. Nevertheless, it is noted that the data link and multilink concept are defined with the aim of making them transparent to the operators (pilots and controllers) in order to minimize the human impacts.
The improvements in Navigation will allow to have more flexible approaches, relieving local communities from noise issues and to improve the ability of ANSPs to design environmentally friendly routings to major airports and achieve the related benefits in pollution and noise enhancing the environmental sustainability and, hence, fostering public acceptance. Better relationships between airports and local communities may also improve the capacity of the airports by relaxing operational restrictions imposed due to noise issues.
Worldwide surveillance coverage from the airport, TMA and EN-ROUTE including the oceanic with a sensitive improvement of the accuracy and integrity, will have a progressive social impact. It will change the level of performance of the traffic flow management applications and challenge the way of controlling with some new interactions with the systems.