Fuse overview

Editor's Notes

• #64: The Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) is an umbrella term for the ongoing, wide-ranging transformation of the United States National Airspace System (NAS). At its most basic level, NextGen represents an evolution from a ground-based system of air traffic control to a satellite-based system of air traffic management. This evolution is vital to meeting future demand and to avoid gridlock in the sky, as well as at U.S. airports. NextGen – being rolled out between 2012-2025 ADS-B – uses GPS to provide air traffic controllers and pilots accurate information that help keep aircraft separated – both in the sky and runways. Both pilots and airtraffic control will be able to see the same real-time display of air traffic – substantially improving safety SWIM – provide a single infrastructure and information system to deliver high quality, timely data to users and applications Current comms between aircraft and airtraffic controllers is mainly voice –adding data will enable faster interaction between air traffic control and the pilots – allowing more taffic to be handled Next Generation Enabled Weather – mashup weather observations and sensor information into a single US weather system, updated in real time. The goal is to reduce weather related delays by half. &0% of all aircraft delays are due to weather. NAS Voice Switch. Single air/ground ground/ground voice communication system to replace the 17 which are currently in use.
• #65: An advanced technology program designed to facilitate greater sharing of Air Traffic Management (ATM) system information, such as airport operational status, weather information, flight data, status of special use airspace, and National Airspace System (NAS) restrictions SWIM will support current and future NAS programs by providing a flexible and secure information management architecture for sharing NAS information SWIM will use commercial off-the-shelf hardware and software to support a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that will facilitate the addition of new systems and data exchanges and increase common situational awareness Core of Program Concept How SWIM lowers information costs: Uses standard interfaces and new protocols such as XML. This greatly reduces the amount of software that must be created share data between FAA systems. How SWIM increases speed for new interfaces: Use of standard interfaces reduces customization time. Plus, XML protocols eliminates the need for “information consumers” to write special parsing program to figure out which data they need. The ability to manage data at a lower cost (and faster setup speed) means more data sharing… which increases common situational awareness and improved agility. Lower information costs Increase speed to establish new interfaces Increase common situational awareness Increase NAS agility
• #66: The SWIM Functional Architecture shows how the IT Infrastructure and the SWIM Core Services layers interoperate. The IT infrastructure provides necessary capabilities, such as basic IP connectivity and naming and addressing, upon which SWIM Core Services depend. Naming and addressing provides the means for systems to identify each other using the Universal Resource Locator (URL) protocol that matches a user defined host name with a specific IP address. Other IT infrastructure capabilities are related to security at the Wide Area Network (WAN) layer and include boundary protection, intrusion detection of unauthorized network activity, as well as response procedures when such activity is observed. Above the IT infrastructure layer are the SWIM service functions that are implemented by SWIM Core Services. The Messaging capability provides services to application layer communication that use the underlying IP network for transport. Interface Management deals with the integration of legacy application layer communication technology and provides a bridge to allow legacy applications to interoperate with net-enabled applications. Application layer communication also has its own unique security challenges for which SWIM Core Services can assist by providing access authorization and authentication prior to initiating services.
• #67: The FAA has identified a need to reduce the high degree of interdependence among systems and move away from the proliferation of unique, point-to-point interfaces. The FAA issued a request for proposal (RFP) to multiple vendors for the procurement of the SWIM service container software and considered many solutions. The SWIM service container software will serve as the infrastructure interface for SWIM. A service container allows the selective deployment of only the services that are really required in a business context for the FAA, unlike in the case of the traditional application server, where some unnecessary and unused functionality that is built into the application service container is deployed even when only a small fraction of that functionality is really required. FuseSource offers multiple technical advantages. The open, community-based development model provides a sustainable model for technology innovation, and the component-based architecture ensures flexibility throughout the duration of the SWIM Program. One of the key challenges for the FAA is transitioning from its “normal way” of doing business. The FAA has a great number and different types of interfaces and systems, and the traditional focus is on unique, point-to-point interfaces for application-to-application data exchange. The SWIM Program aims to reduce the number and types of interfaces within the NAS and support the current legacy modernization programs. A second major challenge is scalability. The FAA has more than 35,000 controllers, technicians, engineers, and support personnel whose daily efforts keep airplanes flying. These individuals are responsible for more than 7,000 takeoffs and landings per hour, more than 660 million passengers and 37 billion cargo revenue ton miles of freight a year, and over 50,000 aircraft through the national airspace system every day. The FAA and the SWIM Program need a system that is scalable to handle increased capacity and future demand. One of the big advantages of using a service-container-based approach is simple scalability and the ability to meet the requirements of the SWIM Program. Reliability is another nonnegotiable challenge. The selected solution should not disrupt the existing flow of information among systems. FuseSource has a proven track record in supporting mission-critical applications, and the FuseSource team backs its products with an experienced professional services organization. * Also considered were the perennial metrics of software development: return on investment (ROI), total cost of ownership (TCO), and time-to-market. FuseSource beat the competition, in part, because FuseSource products are open source and can be used without paying any license fees. More importantly, the strict adherence to standards, the component-based architecture, and the use of Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIPs) provide a modern and efficient way to build a SOA.