ITWP - The Full Monty

Introduction

“The Full Monty”, or more formally SESAR Exercise P06.03.01-EXE-761, was an exercise that came late in the SESAR 1 program and brought together a number of research activities from the program, such as the integration of Advanced Surface Movement Guidance and Control Systems (A-SMGCS) functions, Airport Safety Nets, Routing and Planning, Airfield Ground Lighting (AGL) and Datalink D-TAXI services. What was distinctive was that the exercise took the form of live/shadow mode trials.

The Exercise

The validation took place at Riga International Airport from January to February 2016 with two prototype HMIs being connected to the airport’s live systems for surveillance, flight plan data, and to control the airfield ground lighting system.

During busy times at the airport, teams of controllers were able to trial the features available in the prototype Advanced Controller Working Positions by shadowing the instructions given to the live aircraft from the Tower controllers on those prototypes.

For added flexibility, vehicles fitted with aircraft transponders were made available and were used to simulate aircraft moving around the airfield. These were used during quiet periods at the airport and  provided additional flexibility in that they could be used to create situations that were not practical or feasible to achieve with real aircraft and provided the opportunity to stop, turnaround and repeat specific manoeuvres.

Graffica’s Involvement

The Integrated Tower Working Position (ITWP) is EUROCONTROL’s simulator application used for research into, and prototyping of, the functions of a modern A-SMGCS. Graffica developed and maintained ITWP on behalf of EUROCONTROL from the project’s launch in 2006 through to 2022 and have supported its use in many validation exercises.

For the Full Monty, Graffica developers were required to de-couple the ITWP simulation engine and modify it to take surveillance and data feeds from the live airport systems while still retaining its core A-SMGCS functions – i.e. the HMI itself, the Airport Safety Nets, Routing and Planning, Datalink D-TAXI services, Airfield Ground Lighting control etc.

Crucially, with its existing architecture consisting of numerous service-based components, ITWP is highly suited to such adaptations, and make it possible to replace key system components with newly developed ones that connect to and communicate with the equivalent live airport systems.       

For further insight into the Full Monty, see the video review below: