It is clear digitisation will lead to some fundamental technology and institutional challenges for ANSPs. Asking them to replace national ATM infrastructure with a system-wide digital service is a particular challenge. What will your role be in helping to ensure this new way of working will be safe and resilient?
One of the objectives of the SESAR programme is the evolution of ATM systems from nationally-based networks to, potentially, architectures that could be the same for more than one country, making ATM far more cost-effective.
That’s the goal of the Virtual Centre, where some key components could be horizontally delivered, rather than vertically. In this way, digitalisation can be introduced both nationally and transversally.
We could benefit from other industries’ experience in this area, because we are not the only ones doing it.
From the start, we have to define a digital system that is safe and secure by design. EUROCONTROL can help provide this at a national level but also – as the goal of EUROCONTROL is always to build a network capability – across several States so experiences from one country can be shared elsewhere.
We are in discussions with other industries on how this can be done. We will work with research centres in the automobile sector, for example, where autonomous car designs are being developed to be cyber attack-resilient.
In SESAR 2020 we are leading one of the projects working on developing virtualisation capabilities, a key enabler for ATM modernisation. We will finalise the industrial research and then help move it to deployment, as part of the SESAR 3 programme. We are also progressing on trajectory-based operations, which will increasingly rely on digital communication between aircraft and controller. Through all this data the use of artificial intelligence will be needed and will represent a real game changer.
Until now many aspects of automation have been developed through algorithms providing an essentially determinist approach. Now we are also looking at automation through the application of artificial intelligence – which will raise questions on how to certify an automated system that is not predictable.