No, this is not something new for your Wii or other gaming platform… sorry.
True, experts participating in the TITAN project gathered in Budapest’s Airport Hotel for a gaming exercise but this was serious business. The project has reached an important phase in its development: it was time to validate the services and information defined as the basis of the TITAN concept of operations.
As you will recall, TITAN is about optimizing the aircraft turnaround process by making it more predictable. This is achieved by creating a picture of the turnaround that shows much more detail than was previously the case. TITAN uses a service oriented architecture and some elements of the SWIM concept have also been incorporated. All information is shared and users access information via subscriptions and in accordance with the access rights defined as one of the characteristics of the various data elements.
Gaming is more or less what its title suggests: you get some folks together, assign them various roles that correspond to the roles in the real life environment you are trying to validate and they “play” out their role as pre-written scenarios evolve. In the case of TITAN, the whole affair started with the selected participants being asked to subscribe to the information they thought would be required to perform their roles. So, the persons acting as ground handler, airport operator, airline and ATC had to stop and think what exactly they would need to facilitate the turnaround, knowing of course that asking for too much information is both expensive and can lead to information overload.
Once on the scene of the gaming exercise, several scenarios were enacted. They were all selected to represent either a simple, straightforward turnaround or something with a few kinks in it. This latter were supposed to stress the gaming a little and highlight eventual shortcomings in the services or the data set.
That everything went like clockwork spoke volumes about the careful preparation and attention to detail of those whose job it was to prepare this validation exercise.
In the end everyone involved agreed that this was a useful undertaking and that we all learned a lot about the intricacies of TITAN. One particularly significant aspect was that the originally established set of services and data passed with flying colors. Some refinement will be required but the amount of changes is very limited.
Indeed, the best game in town!