DDS™ - The Proven Data Connectivity Standard for IoT™ Nov. 2016 | Page 13

CHALLENGE
Several independent studies from EUROCONTROL and the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) are predicting
that air traffic volumes will double by 2025. In addition to this volume increase, the Kyoto Protocol is imposing stronger regulation in terms of pollution, thus requiring more effective gate-to-gate air traffic control.
Currently deployed Air Traffic Control and Management technologies are close to reaching their structural
limit and are incapable of optimizing the gate-to-gate transit of aircraft. As a result, existing technologies
will not be able to keep up with the predicted volume increases and will not be effective in optimizing gateto-gate operations and thus reducing pollution and improving the overall performance of the ATM system.

SOLUTION
The CoFlight Program, headed by THALES, SELEX-SI, DSNA, ENAV and Skyguide, has developed a next generation Flight Data Processing (FDP) System, which fully in line with the Single European Sky ATM Research
(SESAR) objectives, will reduce the environmental impact of aviation, improve flight cost efficiency, and
optimize the airspace usage.
CoFlight has embraced open architecture principles and is built on a standard middleware infrastructure.
One of the core technologies at the foundation of CoFlight is the Object Management Group’s Data-Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems (DDS). Leveraging DDS has allowed the CoFlight Program to achieve
these objectives.

BENEFITS
CoFlight deals with well over 6GB of flight data plans which are cached and persisted by DDS. In this use
case, DDS is used as a symmetric distributed cache, providing low-latency access for flight plans to FDP
servers. DDS also takes care of persisting changes to hundreds of flight data plans per second.
Along with posing some unique technical challenges, the FDP Servers are SWAL-2 (Software Assurance Level
2) components—one of the most critical elements of the entire FDP System. Thanks to its industrial strength
development process, the DDS implementation used on the program was capable of providing evidence to
allow the CoFlight consortium to qualify the use of DDS in SWAL-2 components.
DDS is used within CoFlight to distribute real-time updates to the Controller Working Positions (CWP)—
which in some centers can add up to several hundred. The CWPs are able to customize the presentation of
information available taking advantage of the advanced filtering and query capabilities available in DDS.
DDS is also used to allow different CoFlight systems, deployed within or across nations, to interoperate. In
this case DDS takes care of distributing in real-time, with high reliability, efficiency, and scalability the flightdata-plans across a Wide Area Network (WAN). As EUROCAE, in the EC-133 standard, has mandated the use
of DDS for exchanging flight data plans across European air traffic control centers, DDS will also be used to
enable interoperability with non-CoFlight-based ATC/ATM centers.

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CASE STUDIES

DDS is the Data Connectivity
Backbone for Europe’s
Next-Generation Air Traffic
Control and Management
Systems