From vertical to horizontal

The air traffic management (ATM) industry worldwide is undergoing a digital transformation, requiring air navigation service providers (ANSPs) to re-think their system architectures.

Skyguide’s legacy IT system was built on a “vertical silo” architecture where technical domains and systems were managed and operated separately from each other. By adopting the Virtual Centre strategy, Skyguide was able to organize information production, processing and distribution within a stack of uniform horizontal layers, providing operations with a single data set which allowed for operational location independence.

There are three layers at the heart of this new concept.

1. Presentation layer: Universal exchange platform
2. Processing layer: Virtualized infrastructure / Cloud
3. Source layer: Global network

The bottom layer is the one where information from all sources is first gathered into a digital unified network. The middle layer then processes this information in a harmonized and scalable way, to allow for future growth. The top layer for its part organizes this data for presentation to the air traffic controller, using standardized International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) System Wide Information Management (SWIM) formats.

This final layer allows the data to be easily exchanged among all interested stakeholders and ensures it can be cyber protected in a more manageable way than previously. In a time when cybersecurity is a rising concern, this type of architecture is not a threat to security but a major trigger to implement the most modern and effective defence capabilities.

The cultural and organizational challenges to adopting this strategy have been greater than the technical ones. But the process of overcoming these have resulted in a seamless technology transformation and an entirely new way of working to accomplish the objective of location independence.