Ontology-Based Data Integration for Semantic Interoperability in Air Traffic Management

In global air traffic management (ATM), it is necessary to exchange various information related to aircraft operation such as the flight plans, surveillance, airports, weather, and restrictions, among different systems and operators. Hence, the concept of System Wide Information Management (SWIM) has been promoted by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to implement interoperability and harmonization in global operation. In the SWIM environment, all the related stakeholders need to efficiently obtain the necessary ATM data with situational awareness from various information domains. However, this is difficult to realize in the current system, as different data are structured based on different data models. In this study, we construct domain ontologies based on flight, aeronautical, and weather information exchange models. Further, we develop a common ontology that uniformly defines the inconsistent representation in terms of the 4D, 3D, and 2D concepts and their inclusion relations and propose an integration method for heterogeneous domain ontologies. Moreover, we apply the proposed ontologies to a SWIM test system. The applicability and efficiency of the proposal are demonstrated through a case study in the SWIM environment.