A system engineering data management framework in a large scale project in the ATM domain

With SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) there is a program well on the way to developing and implementing advanced ATM (Air Traffic Management) concepts. Beyond the scope of the SESAR programme in the LRM2020 project there are investigations on sectorless ATM taking place, which would mean not an evolution but a revolution of current ATM. This discussion paper argues that sectorless ATM can not only be integrated and exploited within the SESAR innovations framework but also continues SESAR's shift towards a more aircraft-centered view. The paper elaborates on the possibilities of bringing together the two concepts and thus conjointly meeting the goals of SESAR and mastering the challenges of future ATM.

HE European Airspace is becoming more and more congested as traffic is forecast to grow steadily over the next 20 years and beyond. To meet the challenge of sustainable growth of Air Transport Management in Europe, an Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe (ACARE) was launched in June 2001. ACARE's main focus is to establish and carry forward a Strategic Research Agenda (SRA 1/2) that will influence all European stakeholders in the planning of research programs, particularly national and EU programs, in line with the Vision 2020 and the goals it identifies. Among these programs, SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) and its various phases (from Definition to Development and ultimately Deployment) has the ambition to face the lack of commitment from a part of the Stakeholders or from deciders in previous initiatives. The Definition Phase, jointly funded by EUROCONTROL and the European Commission, will deliver a European ATM Master Plan based on future aviation requirements, and will identify the actions needed to achieve the objectives of SESAR. At the European level, other programs are strongly linked with SESAR, including the Joint Technology Initiatives (JTI) a new instrument provided by the European Seventh Framework Programme, to support research of long duration. One of those initiatives, called CLEAN SKY, will create various technology demonstrators, including flight test vehicles that will be essential for successful market introduction. Research into the future of the air transportation system critically depends upon the ability to evaluate the effects of the revolutionary candidate concepts across the entire air transportation system. The testing of these concepts through modeling and simulation can provide useful information on improvements on system capacity/safety and related environmental impact. In this evolutionary European context, the French Aerospace Laboratory (ONERA) is carrying out an ambitious program (IESTA) to design a modeling and simulation infrastructure able of evaluating innovative air transport concepts. This platform has to be considered as a mean to help harmonization of panEuropean assessment tools for innovative research on future Air Transport Systems (ATS). This paper firstly introduces organizational issues of the IESTA Program focusing on expected benefits of the underlying approach from the customer's point of view. We then discuss system architectural issues of the platform as well as technological features. Finally, we give a detailed presentation of a rapid prototype of the first version

Air traffic growth will probably lead the terrestrial ATM communication means to saturation around 2015-2025. The ATM needs are evolving to propose solutions that allow to cope with the future air traffic. In Europe, the SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) program is leading the evolution to the new operational concept for the European ATM. In this framework, new communications systems are under study to ensure the future communication services that will not be supported by the current systems, mainly based on VHF radio communications. Taking into account the safety and security requirements that aeronautical community imposes to any new system, it is necessary to start the definition of the new communication means to be ready in the required timeframe. Satellite communications will probably play a role in the future air communications infrastructure. Current satellite communications standards that are used in air communications do not fit to the requirements announced by the aviation community. In this paper, it is presented how a terrestrial safety communications protocol (AMACS) could be modified to satisfy satellite constraints. AMACS has been proposed as candidate for terrestrial communications in L band within the frame of SESAR.

The future European Air Traffic Management (ATM) System is currently being defined by the Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) programme. Iris is the European Space Agency programme to develop an Air-Ground communication system for the SESAR programme. Within the Iris Programme, ANTARES focuses on the development of a new satellite-based communication system based on the use of low-cost user terminals through the realization of a new satellite communication standard. The present paper describes the system design process defined and adopted in the ANTARES project to cope with the uncertainties of the user requirements The proposed process is based on the definition of System Architecture Options allowing to evaluate the impact of requirements variability on the satellite system design. Each System Architecture Option will implement a set of Design Options which are system or technology solutions adopted to design the system or its elements. An insight on the Design Option relevant to the airborne user terminal features is provided in the paper.KeywordsANTARESL-BandATMSESARSystem design options

Aircraft Trajectory Planning Under Uncertainty by Light Propagation

Facing flight centred air traffic control (ATC) and more monitoring tasks at future controller working positions (CWP), it becomes even more important that air traffic controllers (ATCo) always focus their attention at the relevant spots on their human machine interface (HMI). This paper outlines relevant literature about attention and attention guidance (AG) in different domains, explains the concept for an AG prototype for sectorless air traffic management (ATM) and the plan for its validation in the course of Single European Sky ATM Research (PJ.16-04-03, SESAR2020). The AG prototype considers three aspects. First, the desired area of attention: An assistance system calculates where the ATCo should look at depending on input data like radar and flight plan data. Second, an external system relying on eye tracking and user inputs determines where the current ATCo focus is. Third, if the desired and the actual area of attention are not the same, mechanisms to guide the ATCo’s attention will be triggered taking a strategy of escalating visual cues into account. The latter comprises an intelligent display of action indicators with respect to time, position and appearance as well as pre-tactical inattention indicators. The AG prototype aims to increase controller productivity, improve situation awareness as well as reduce workload and stress level in a future flight centred ATC environment.

This paper builds on top of a collaborative ATFM framework previously published, which demonstrated a potential in significant pre-tactical system delay reduction over the current European ATFM practices. In this paper, we aim to raise the technology readiness level (TRL) of the original works, focusing on improving the tractability of its DCB optimizer. To this end, we apply a Dantzig-Wolfe (DW) decomposition approach and use high performance computing (HPC) techniques to attempt the solution in a short time. The main contribution of this paper is to mitigate the computational burden faced by previous approaches, which will make all the contributions demonstrated therein more operationally feasible.

This article describes a safety assessment of a new Air Traffic Management (ATM) operational concept—RNP Parallel Approach Transitions (RPAT)—at a hypothetical major international-hub airport. The methodology employed is that developed initially for the innovative and highly complex Single European Sky ATM Research programme but further refined by the authors and applied to a wide range of safety-related projects. Though the described application of the methodology is based on experience gained from a specific ATM project, this article does not take the form of a case study. Rather, the operational environment (OE) has been generalised and the article explains how the safety of RPAT operations would be assessed for this generalised application. Part 1 describes how the required safety properties of the RPAT concept are derived at the ATM-service level—this is the highest level of abstraction, and addresses what the ATM service needs to achieve for the safe movement of aircraft in the airspace (and on the airport surface), without any reference to the underlying end-to-end ATM system. Part 2 describes how those safety properties are then allocated to the ATM system architectural elements and how they are shown to have been met in the implemented system.

Creating a successful team based on number of developers, previous experience of programmer, and their level of education has been a topic of research for decades. Some studies suggest small size teams are better, while others find larger teams more successful. In addition, large projects are more complicated and more error prone. Discovery of the optimal values for these factors in software engineering is always considered as a major challenge. This paper examined the size of the team and scale of project and the level of education of developers on the status of Build events of software based on 11 million actual interactions performed by 83 programmers in a dataset called Enriched Event Streams dataset. The programmers had various programming skills and used variety of programming languages. The results based on 15,000 hours of development activity log indicate that the optimal size of the team is medium size, with developers engaged in large scaled projects without graduate degrees from universities. In other words, experience in large scale projects provides more advantages in contrast to graduate education that has negative impact on programming skills.

Irrigated agriculture has increased steadily in Syria over the last decades, almost doubling since 1985. This mounting pace has responded to the nation’s food security policy objectives to satisfy the food production needs of an increasing population that features one of the largest growth rates in the world, namely 3,50 percent in 1985 and still 3,39 percent in 2007. Total expenditures for irrigated agriculture accounted for almost 70 percent of all expenditures in agriculture. Sustainable irrigation water policies aimed at increasing the efficiency of water use in agriculture and at conserving water resources by reducing future consumption. The Euphrates River is 2.800 km long and its middle traverses a wide floodplain in Syria, where it is used extensively for irrigation, and the Euphrates Dam is 230 ft (70 m) high. The total estimated water use volume is about 15 billion m3. The Euphrates and Orontes basins account for about 50% and 20% of the water use respectively. About 701.634 ha has been irrigated by ground water in the year 1997. This area represents 60% of the total irrigated land in Syria It has been gradually increased from 30% during 1970 to 44% in 1980 and 49% in 1990. The Government projects extended on 349.820 hectare area, which includes large, medium and small scale farms. The small scale government project is under 2000 hectare, but large scale project over 20.000 hectare areas. The Syrian Government wants to ensure the food supply for sharply increasing population based on established governmental agricultural projects, as state-owned farms. Water balance for Syria indicates that most of the basins are in deficit. This will be exacerbated further especially in basins encompassing large urban areas and if the country’s population continues to grow at its current rate (about 3%) and water use efficiency is not increased effectively.

In this paper, we present a variance minimization (VM) procedure for rare event simulation in tandem queueing networks. We prove that the VM method can produce a zero variance. The VM method is suitable to compute optimal importance sampling (IS) parameters for small scale tandem networks. For large scale tandem networks we propose a sub-optimal IS (SOIS) method, which projects the optimal biased transition probabilities of the corresponding small scale system into those of a large scale system. In other words, we establish an efficient IS method for a large scale system by zooming into a small scale system and then projecting our findings into the large scale system. The numerical results show that our SOIS method can produce accurate results with very short CPU time, while many other methods often require much longer.

Team work is the norm in major development projects and industry is continually striving to improve team effectiveness. Researchers have established that teams with high levels of social sensitivity tend to perform well when completing a variety of specific collaborative tasks. Social sensitivity is the personal ability to perceive, understand, and respect the feelings and viewpoints of others, and it is reliably measurable. However, the tasks in recent research have been primarily short term, requiring only hours to finish, whereas major project teams work together for longer durations and on complex tasks. Our claim is that, social sensitivity can be a key component in predicting the performance of teams that carry out major projects. Our goal is to determine if previous research, which was not focused on students or professionals in scientific or technical fields, is germane for people in computing disciplines. This paper reports the results from an empirical study that investigates whether social sensitivity is correlated with the performance of student teams on large semester-long projects. The overall result supports our claim that the team social sensitivity is highly correlated with successful team performance. It suggests, therefore, that educators in computer-related disciplines, as well as computer professionals in the workforce, should take the concept of social sensitivity seriously as an aid or obstacle to productivity.

Engineering data management through different breakdown structures in a large-scale project

Luminescent solar concentrator (LSC) is a device that has luminescent molecules embedding or topping polymeric or glass waveguide to generate electricity from sunlight with a photovoltaic cell attachment. LSCs can be employed both in small and large scale projects, independent on the direction or angle of the surface with respect to the sun, promising more freedom for integration in urban environments compared to the traditional PV systems. The aim of the SEB&C PDEng project is to investigate the applicability of this innovative technology in the built environment and to bridge the gap of knowledge linking societal, design and technological aspects. The final goal is to exhibit potential application concepts of LSC developed by co-creative methods at SPARK campus which is a hub for open innovation in built environment. Necessity of a paradigm shift towards sustainable and smart cities came into being due to the significant increase in energy demand of the buildings. The challenge is to increase renewable sources in the energy mix while designing aesthetic environments. Thus, building integrated renewable energy technologies represent a great opportunity to help overcome this current challenge. Smart energy, energy efficiency and use of renewable sources are key aspects to be considered nowadays and many innovative technologies need further exploitation to be commercially viable, such as luminescent solar concentrator.

Software industries are progressively adopting the agile development practices of customized models such as Extreme Programming (XP) or Scrum or Rational Unified Process (RUP). Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) are frequently used agile models, whereas Rational Unified Process (RUP) is one popular classic plan driven software development methodology. Both agile and plan driven models have their own merits & demerits such as XP has good engineering practices, team collaboration and on the other hand weak documentation, poor performance in medium & large scale projects. Scrum is based on project management practices. RUP model has some limitations such as impractical for small and fast paced projects, tendency to be over budgeted, condemn rapid changes in requirements. This research paper based on proposes hybrid framework eXSRUP by combining strengths of Scrum, XP and RUP by suppressing their limitations to produce high quality software.