Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine has recently published a very interesting article with the title “Integration Nightmares”. It is about the problems planners and engineers are facing in integrating the battlefield “system of systems”. As the author reports, high level military planners do not like to pay to solve complexity… Researchers have to weave through political, technological and financial obstacle courses to figure out how to create that “system of systems”.
You may shrug this news off and ask what relevance does this have to air traffic management’s SWIM? After all, we have SESAR and it will take care of such detail.
Sure, SESAR will help in bringing the partners together and in coordinating things but the obstacle course will still remain and needs to be negotiated. OK but why single out SWIM?
For most people, System Wide Information Management (SWIM) is a physical network, some standards and protocols and a few applications with some kind of network management thrown in, but little else.
If you read the articles about “SWIM – The external enabler of ATM” and “SWIM – The pretty picture” it will be clear that SWIM requires an institutional framework that spans at least the European Union and which also works with the rest of the world, both legacy and SWIM-like parts. Achieving data level interoperability is not a big deal… Achieving common quality and licensing standards, access rules and so on is where things start to get complicated. In spite of European bodies like the former JAA and now EASA and others, we know how tough it is to get various authorities to play together. This is especially true when national bodies only remotely connected with aviation claim a part of the fun.
We must also keep in mind that some problems will come from issues the solution of which have nothing to do with information management or aviation as such. A good example of this was the requirement pushed by the accident investigators asking to record air/ground digital link messages on board aircraft. They wanted everything, even elements that could have been obtained from the ground where a log of those messages is already available. The requirement would add substantial cost to digital link equipage without any tangible improvement to safety. Scratching below the surface revealed that the accident investigators were refusing to consider taking ground recordings even where this would be the best solution simply because some European States were consistently refusing to share ATC recordings in incident cases…
No doubt the implementation of SWIM will face many hurdles in the engineering sense but solving those is not a big problem.
It is the direct and indirect institutional issues that will create our very own obstacle course and which will take the biggest and longest effort to solve. The current process of transition from AIS to AIM is a step in the right direction but more, much more, will need to be done and now rather than tomorrow.
Addressing SWIM’s institutional aspects to create the necessary European environment and worldwide agreements must be high on everybody’s agenda.