Virtual Centre

Skyguide’s Virtual Centre programme has started the transformation of its operations by exploiting the potential of open and connected digital technologies. It is also a major step into a more location independent future which will allow it to operate Europe’s air traffic management (ATM) more efficiently. Klaus Meier, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Skyguide, shares how the programme will deliver new levels of scalability, resilience, reliability and cost-efficiency – increasingly important capabilities in a post-COVID-19 aviation world.

In the last Blueprint we focused on the Virtual Centre programme, the location independent ATM service concept being pioneered by Skyguide to provide a more flexible, resilient service. How has that progressed?

With our latest milestone we have decoupled the controller working position from the system in the back, something we were told four years ago was impossible. Well, it is possible and we went live with this second critical milestone of the new architecture. The controller working position can now be hooked to any sector in the airspace independent from the system in the back. As a reminder in 2018 we had reached the first milestone by introducing a common integration platform replacing complex point-to-point connections. Within the next 12 months we expect to reach the third and last milestone to stop data duplication by using the Flight Object Repository across all critical applications.

How do you see the Virtual Centre concept transforming air traffic management across Europe?

An air navigation service provider (ANSP) should contribute to the effectiveness and efficiency of the ATM network, and not only to its own sectors. The driver behind that is digitalisation, which will only work if everyone has access to the same connected data, that is aggregated and which then can then be used to apply intelligent algorithms. Digitalisation consists of those steps and with that we create this flexibility.

In the future, we manage the flow through a European ATM network and this flow is optimised not in the sector or the network node anymore but in the network itself. That means that the system understands that if you have a potential conflict around Heathrow, it can be resolved by slowing down a flight further out in the network, for example, over France or Italy.

Isn’t that the job of the European Network Manager?

The network could be a deterministic system, based on filed flight plans. However, you will always have disturbances – summer thunderstorms or merging with complex airport approaches or departures, for example, which will require re-routings or altitude changes and that remains the job of air traffic managers in the various ANSPs. But they will be more involved in traffic flow management and less in separation and deconflicting at a sector level.

The question will be: do we optimise capacity in a specific sector over North-Eastern France, or the whole network? If it’s in the network, we will need to collect and aggregate the data and then run intelligent systems to propose solutions. This will most likely be more effective and efficient than controllers trying to separate all aircraft from each other in a sector. We should let the system do the deconflicting in the network and by that relieving the controllers from tremendous cognitive load and use their human capabilities in areas where humans cannot and must not be replaced.

How will the Virtual Centre concept help with the challenge of dealing with major levels of market volatility?

The COVID crisis is a brutal reminder that the old way of managing an airspace, this location-dependent, fully integrated way of operating, is neither flexible nor resilient enough to respond to changes in traffic requirements or in demands.

It has been a wake-up call and there will be no “old normal” anymore. ANSPs have hardly any variable costs – we have controllers and equipment which must be available no matter how many aircraft are flying; if there are more flights we might need more controllers but to bring them on to a sector should traffic grow takes usually three years until they are certified. Should traffic shrink we cannot just let them go.

Thus, the whole model is too slow and inflexible to respond to changes in demand. We do have a structural problem because our operating model is vertically integrated and with hardly any variable cost. We have to find out how new models can be introduced and correctly incentivised on a European model in order to become more resilient and flexible. Again, the Virtual Centre with its focus on services and location-independence could be a pathfinder towards this objective. The European Commission sees it very similarly and the current Master Plan describes this in clear terms. We simply have to have the courage to do it. And Skyguide shows that it is feasible.