Many air travellers may recognise the feeling. You are sitting aboard an aircraft when the pilot announces a ten or 15-minute departure delay. “Usually, the explanation is that there is a capacity issue,” observes Transoft Solutions senior product manager Pier Ferraris.
With busier skies on the horizon (in February 2024, EUROCONTROL predicted more than 12 million flights in Europe in 2030), it has never been more important for airspace capacity to work efficiently while maintaining safety standards.
“The more you delay, the more it’s going to have an effect on airlines, airports, and Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs),” Pier says. “It’s crucial to be able to control these flows and know what’s going to happen.”
This is where AirTOP WIZer comes in as an effective tool for managing information in an Area Control Centre (ACC). The software brings together data from various sources to provide detailed, up-to-the-minute forecasts of air traffic demand and complexity, as well as controller workload. Securely integrated with airport and air traffic control systems, AirTOP WIZer provides the big picture, informing Flow Managers about the action required to effectively and safely manage airspace. AirTOP WIZer models the full operational environment. It measures traffic complexity and workloads for all sector types, En Route and TMA, and for tower controllers.
The tool provides traffic flow and capacity management options. It can deliver warnings when the entry count, occupancy, or controller workload/complexity is forecast to exceed a user-defined threshold. It displays the results of reducing demand or increasing capacity.
The information, and the forecasts, enable managers to react, and plan ahead. Pier explains: “They can decide to change how the airspace is configured. They might ask for some traffic to be rerouted or apply different measures that will make controllers’ lives easier, allowing them to manage the demand against the capacity.”
Highly accurate models produced by fast-time simulations are the key to how AirTOP WIZer works. The software uses input data from various sources, including in-flight progress messages, live radar tracks, military airspace activation plans, wind and storm forecasts, the current sector opening scheme, and the current activated scenarios or regulations.
During the fast-time simulations, AirTOP WIZer repeatedly calculates the future air situation, logging relevant events for each flight and controller workload. “The tool takes a snapshot of the current reality every minute and constantly updates the simulator with this new picture, so we get a new set of results at whatever frequency we need,” Pier explains.
Accurate information means controllers “will be better informed to take the next decision”, he says. And, crucially, controllers and managers/supervisors can make decisions in real time. “The Flow Management Position (FMP) can see what their sector is going to look like hours from now, if there may be a bottleneck, or if there’s going to be an issue, so they can react before it happens,” Pier says.
“The software is able to predict conflicts, when an aircraft might be conflicting with another in two, three, five hours from now,” he points out. “Alerting the controller that they will have to monitor this conflict and resolve it.” AirTOP WIZer was designed to be user-friendly while presenting complex information. A graphical interface displays the simulation results using charts and colour-coded metrics. “Something else that’s very important about an interface is how you can interact with the information,” Pier adds.
“WIZer stands for ‘What If Analyzer’. Once you have the information available, you want to test what you can do about it. It’s important to be able to test different solutions, alternatives and measures you can apply to optimise how you will operate.” AirTOP WIZer users can tweak, change, adapt, and test different solutions simply by using their mouse. The interface compares the published/current environment with as many ‘what-if’ environments as desired. The information continuously updates as new data becomes available.
Pier says: “The FMPs are better informed about what’s going to happen. They have more control, because they have more evidence of how they should be operating. They have results justifying the decisions they will need to take.” AirTOP WIZer provides clear insights into safely and efficiently managing capacity. “This is the most advanced way you can predict the trajectory of an aircraft,” Pier says. He adds: “The user owns the model, so they can calibrate it based on the flow managers’ feedback, constantly enhancing its accuracy.”
All fast time simulation results are archived. Users can use the AirTOP WIZer Replay feature to fully restore and reproduce simulations for post-ops analysis, employee training and continuous improvement. And AirTOP WIZer can analyse planned airspace changes. “One of the best ways to check if a change will actually be beneficial while keeping the same safety levels is using fast-time simulations,” Pier says.
Users can test the effects of increased traffic in a newly designed airspace definition. “They may wonder ’Can I cope with this new demand with the current airspace configuration, or with a new airspace configuration?’ That’s something you can easily do with our tool,” Pier says.
AirTOP WIZer can also be integrated with the other AirTOP modules to offer even more utility for customers. Transoft Solutions has close customer relationships, he adds. “We are aware of what our customers would like to achieve, but we have to try to align the goals of each organisation.”