A Software Factory for Air Traffic Data

Modern enterprise architecture requires a flexible, scalable and upgradeable infrastructure that allows communication, and subsequently collaboration, between heterogeneous information processing and computing environments. Heterogeneous systems often use different data representations for the same data items, limiting collaboration. Although this problem is conceptually straightforward, the process of data conversion is error prone, often dramatically underestimated, and surprisingly complex. The complexity is often the result of the non-standard data representations that are used by computing systems in the aviation domain. This paper describes some of the work that is being done by Boeing Advanced Air Traffic Management to address this challenge. A prototype software factory for air traffic data management is being built and evaluated. The software factory provides the capability for a user such as a Systems Engineer or an Air Traffic Domain Expert to create an interface model. The model will allow the user to specify entities such as data items, scaling, units, headers and footers, representation, and coding. The factory automatically creates a machine usable interface. A prototype for a Domain Specific Language to assist in this task is being developed