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EUROCONTROL’s PRC publishes Performance Insight #7: Reorganising ATS with Virtual Centres

17 January 2023

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Air navigation services performance review

EUROCONTROL’s Performance Review Commission (PRC) has published its seventh release of Performance Insight, looking at how ATM capacity and scalability will be impacted by the technical transformation process and new operational concepts, taking the example of virtualisation in general and virtual centres in particular.

Although COVID has had a major impact on traffic levels and also on the expected rate of growth in the future, EUROCONTROL’s latest long term forecast is for some 16 million flights in 2050, 5 million more than in 2019. Accordingly, Europe’s ATM system will need to evolve, including introducing concepts such as Virtual Centres.

The Performance Insight looks in detail at a number of different approaches to virtualisation and examines what progress is already being made in this area. It also looks at what benefits might be expected and what issues need to be addressed.

“The PRC is in favour of the development of a service-oriented architecture to address future capacity gaps. It will support the transformation process by ensuring an independent evaluation of set and achieved performance goals of emerging “flagship” projects such as Virtual Centres. It is an ongoing process and the PRC will continue to evaluate achieved versus expected benefits and document the results as part of the transformation support strategy.”

Marinus de Jong Chairman of the PRC, EUROCONTROL