Considerations in the design of an air traffic management system

The ATMS (air traffic management system) is a network-centric system of people, computer systems, and communication systems that manages en route flights and flight operations at airports. It is a network-centric system being used to manage another network-centric system, namely an air transportation system. At Stevens Institute of Technology we are developing a design language for network-centric systems and design guidelines for the development system of engineers and domain specialists involved in designing and integrating systems. This paper provides an outline of the design language under construction and the design guidelines being studied. Specifically, we discuss the ATMS mission objectives, ATMS sample usage scenarios, and system objectives for an ATMS.