Intelligent information and interactive systems for pilot situational awareness enabled by a federation architecture

The domain of digital air-ground integration is relatively young for civil aviation, and the move from procedures between pilots, controllers, airport and airline operators using voice towards digital integration of aircraft with ground systems will take its time. The digital datalink that is used or is currently under conception will make the aircraft an integral part of an information system. However, CNS (communication, navigation, surveillance) technologies for datalink have followed a bottom up development approach, without taking into account a system architecture view. The lack of this global view resulted in customized applications per technology. A federation architecture is needed in applying a top-down approach on system architectural level to integrate the different applications and technologies. The applications that are federated in this architecture must span the widest possible scope of co-operative and collaborative air-ground integration. We show in this paper that such an approach is feasible, and develop the building blocks of this federation architecture.