Transitioning from Legacy Air Traffic Management to Airspace Management through Secure, Cloud-Native Automation Solutions

Advancements in Cloud-native services, Machine-Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Rapid Application Development (RAD) using the Agile methodology has led countless industries to achieving desirable levels of automation while reducing cost and improving quality software deployments, timely / iterative delivery, and accountability. Coupling this framework with the principle of security as a shared responsibility further enhances the efficacy of an integrated Development, Security, and Operations (DevSecOps) Team within organizations to deliver secured digital solutions. Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) around the world are currently exploring and embracing the digital evolution shifting from monolithic, legacy automation platforms to an application framework of microservices to allow for flexible operations as capabilities and airspace operations evolve. Specific to the US, the ATM automation system of today is comprised of both safety and non-safety critical systems, with mission-essential, efficiency-critical, and mission-support services that are predominately maintained and evolved through multi-year, one contractor-led programs. Although the system has proven resilient, it has not proven to be agile and flexible to allow for advances in capabilities on-board aircraft or in the data integration and sharing with other NAS automation systems. This creates significant overhead in development, sustainability, and operations of the current automation system, and leaves modernization efforts—in terms of new capabilities—in constant investment decision planning cycles, costing agencies not just money, but more time to innovate. To advance aviation into a new generation of interoperability leveraging collaborative frameworks and application specific capabilities, ANSPs must adapt to innovative methods to collect, process, and deliver critical and essential aeronautical, weather, and flight information to air traffic control operators and ultimately to airspace users. Doing so can not only lead to sustaining NAS automation systems while reducing the costs to develop and operate these systems, but it also provides an opportunity to present strategies on how to dramatically reduce the time and integration efforts needed to deploy new capabilities. Leveraging cloud-native technologies and services is a way to realize this automation evolution vision for ANSPs.This paper examines the migration from today’s systems to secure, cloud-native platforms to prove that Mission Services and Mission Applications can be rapidly available / deployable to operators who provide separation and flow management services, using a cyber-secured cloud-native environment. Aeronautical data typically used for tactical decision making is now seen as crucial to the decision-making process in Air Traffic Management (ATM). Integrating global and localized datasets into a digital aviation data platform enhances the capabilities of the solutions and opens the possibilities of leveraging big data analytics and microservices to compute trajectory predictions (TP), demand capacity balancing (DCB), arrival and departure sequencing, airspace delay, among others, in real-time to achieve operator-driven mission objectives. Technology has reached a state of maturity, especially in cloud and hybrid cloud solutions, to support safety of life operations, like ATM. This paper identifies approaches that are being considered for that migration to support the integration of new airspace entrants, the use of application services to provide a dynamic, evolutionary ATM platform, and addresses some of the safety and security strategies that must be considered for this evolution.