ATC/airports secure information sharing and low-maintenance management

Our solutions are designed to integrate data feeds between ATC systems, airlines, and airports - in a secure, cost-effective, and easily administered way. For example:

In the past, ATC was mainly done locally, within a single sector and with coordination just between neighbouring sectors, and the ATC systems had a very low level of integration. Now, in order to deal with the enormous growth of traffic, ATC is more and more becoming a global scale optimisation problem.

Traffic management now has to be done at a larger scale, based on information from multiple sources and in a much larger time frame. This turns ATC in a problem of Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) with many stakeholders like control centres, airports or airlines. For example, from an overall perspective, it is not very efficient if a plane takes of in time, travels en route and then has to spend half in hour in a waiting stack, because there is no landing slot at the destination airport. It is much more economic and efficient to delay the departure, travel en route and land without delays.

But things are not so easy, what are the impacts of this delayed flight? Does another plane need the plane’s gate at the departure airport? Can the plane en route phase take place without congestion? What is the impact on the plane’s further usage during the day? CDM now can help to improve the overall air traffic. The base of CDM is a Common Situational Awareness, much beyond the level of communication between neighbouring sectors. Common Situational Awareness is now achieved by an online data exchange between man stakeholders, like control centres, coordination centres, airlines, airports, providers of weather information, military, public authorities and many more. The improved situational awareness is then used for distributed planning and analysis.

CDM is a good idea, but is hard to implement in the real world because of the enormous complexity of the ATC systems. And it opens up vulnerabilities in the overall ATC system which was mainly ignored in the past.

In the past, IT security of ATC systems was considered a minor concern. To a certain degree, this was acceptable, since these systems were really a difficult target for attackers, as they were mainly proprietary, often based on low tech communication means like fax or voice and not directly connected to public networks. In the future, the trend to collaborative ATC systems will dramatically increase the IT security requirements.

ATC/airport secure, manageable information sharing

To solve this complex problem, ObjectSecurity offers a complete technology suite with OpenPMF at its core. OpenPMF is an innovative security policy management framework for distributed IT environments. OpenPMF simplifies security management in any large, complex, heterogeneous, networked IT environments and makes it more efficient and more accurate, and therefore less expensive. OpenPMF has been designed to secure the complex air traffic management IT environments. OpenPMF integrates with all middleware platforms currently considered in SESAR (CCM, DDS, and Webservices),

In addition, ObjectSecurity's SecureMiddleware CCM platform (together with ObjectWall firewall and MICO CORBA) has been designed to meet curent and future ATC requirements.

ATC/airport secure integration case study (AD4)

The diagram below illustrates a deployment of the entire solution (AD4 project, 02/2007):

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