Skyguide's Virtual Centre journey continues at full speed with the successful on-boarding of two core ATM applications on a Service-Oriented Infrastructure (SOI).

After the successful deployment of a new way to handle air routes, Skyguide’s journey towards “One Sky by One System” continues in the right direction. In an ongoing effort to create the foundations for a Virtual Centre, we made a significant step forward with the recent on-boarding of two core Air Traffic Management (ATM) applications on a Service-Oriented Infrastructure (SOI). With this major achievement, Skyguide remains in the forefront in Switzerland and in Europe to make ATM more efficient from an economic and environmental perspective – a need that was further stressed by the COVID-19 pandemic.   Such an on-boarding process goes beyond classic virtualisation as we were also able to modernise the applications in a way that allows us to benefit, for instance, from a higher level of IT security through the deployment of transversal corporate services.   A similar transformation was first tested and achieved on a flow management and traffic forecast application. This first successful experience was a springboard to then virtualise and migrate two other ATM applications at the sharp end of our operations:

  • The data processing engine that provides decision support information to air traffic controllers;
  • And the Swiss flight data processing system that provides flight information to air traffic controllers and allows for the coordination with adjacent control centers.

  Such a modernisation process will bring significant benefits to Skyguide’s technical services, as it will open the door for a greater level of automation and increase the efficiency of our engineering services. The virtualisation and migration process will also lead to higher cost-efficiency and lower energy consumption through the rationalisation of the physical infrastructure. Last but the not least, this enables access to state-of-the-art IT security services.   Above all, the on-boarding of core ATM applications on the SOI platform is another significant step for the Virtual Centre programme, as it contributes to making Skyguide’s technical services location-independent and is an important step towards one virtual data centre.