Providing a flight object manager in the national airspace system

In order to promote information sharing within and outside the National Airspace System (NAS), it is important that we provide an enterprise messaging service to facilitate one-to-many transmission of application objects across the enterprise. In addition, it is just as important to define and encapsulate the business logic that governs the interaction of these application objects. Encapsulating the business logic in an application service layer above the messaging service layer ensures that the business policy is applied consistently across the enterprise, and simplifies maintenance when the business logic has to be revised to reflect new policies or use cases. In this paper we will focus on the definition of a flight object manager that uses the enterprise messaging service. Flight data is one of the most complex application data types within the NAS. Flight data sharing is also crucial to the success of many NextGen initiatives. Provision of a flight object manager with a standards-based interface will allow open access of NAS flight data from automation systems within and outside of the NAS. Providing a national flight object manager will present these clients with a single authoritative source of NAS flight data. In this paper we will outline the business logic that will govern the collection, eligibility of access, aggregation, and reconstitution of flight data. The business logic will present an up-to-date and consistent view of the NAS flight data to the clients as control of a flight passes through tower, terminal, en route, and oceanic domains. We will describe a prototype implementation of a flight object manager, and how the prototype was used to demonstrate the feasibility of an integrated en route, terminal, tower, oceanic, and traffic metering system. The prototype demonstrates that a client, like an airline, can subscribe to the flight object manager and provide updates to the NAS; it also demonstrates that en route, terminal, tower, and oceanic automation systems can act as both providers and subscribers of flight information managed by the flight object manager.