Networked
Air System
Information Management
Robert E. Filman • RIACS/NASA Ames Research Center • filman@computer.org
Iflew to Washington, DC, last week — a trip richin distributed information management. Buy-ing tickets, at the gate, in flight, landing, and at
the baggage claim, myriad messages about my
reservation, the weather, our flight plans, gates,
bags, and so forth flew among a variety of travel
agency, airline, and US Federal Aviation Adminis-
tration (FAA) computers and personnel. By and
large, each kind of information ran on a particu-
lar application, often specialized to its own data
formats and communications network.
I went to Washington to attend an FAA meeting
on System-Wide Information Management (SWIM)
for the National Airspace System (www.nas
-architecture.faa.gov/Tutorials/NAS101.cfm). NAS
(and its information infrastructure, SWIM) is an
attempt to bring greater regularity, efficiency, and
uniformity to the collection of stovepipe applications
now used to manage air traffic. Current systems hold
information about flight plans, flight trajectories,
weather, air turbulence, current and forecast weath-
er, radar summaries, hazardous condition warnings,
airport and airspace capacity constraints, temporary
flight restrictions, and so forth.
Information moving among these stovepipe sys-
tems is usually mediated by people (for example, air
traffic controllers) or single-purpose applications.
People, whose intelligence is critical for difficult
tasks and unusual circumstances, are not as efficient
as computers for tasks that can be automated. Bet-
ter information sharing can lead to higher system
capacity, more efficient utilization, and safer oper-
ations. Better information sharing through greater
automation is possible, though not necessarily easy.
An Airspace Utopia
Ideally, when an airplane flying over the Rocky
Mountains encounters turbulence and shifts its
course, all “interested” parties could be made
aware of the situation. For example, pilots of other
airplanes on that flight path could be warned to
avoid the turbulence; workers at the baggage ser-
vice in San Francisco, having a better idea of the
real arrival times, could reschedule the luggage
carousels; operators of connections for the pas-
sengers on that flight could make appropriate deci-
sions about holding (or not holding) and routing
flights; air traffic controllers could verify that the
plane’s new trajectory doesn’t collide with some
other craft; climate researchers on long-term tur-
bulence patterns could add that incident to their
database; and countless other future applications
that might care about airspace information could
patch into the information network.
What do we demand of a system moving that
much flight information? Important “-ilities” include
• efficiency (you can’t tell everyone everything),
• evolvability (you don’t know all the future
applications),
• scalability (this is a big system, it will grow, and
you don’t want it to be architecturally limited in
capacity or vulnerable to a few points of failure),
• maintainability (when things don’t work, you
must be able to quickly find out why),
• reliability (for obvious reasons),
• quality of service (you need to get important
information to its destinations quickly, defer-
ring the unimportant — information about a
hijacking takes priority over climate research,
for example) and
• security (information should be injected into
and removed from the system only by appro-
priate people).
The definition of appropriate in this last point
includes not only keeping black hats from inject-
ing spurious information into the system, but also
the commercial concerns about sharing business
information. An airline is willing to tell traffic con-
trol that a plane is late. It might even be willing to
share that information with its own ground oper-
ations. However, the airline will often want to keep
that information not only from its competitors, but
4 MARCH • APRIL 2004 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1089-7801/04/$20.00 © 2004 IEEE IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING
From the Editor in Chief...